RevNeujahr

I don't understand God . . . but that's okay.

2012-02-01T12:49:00.001-05:00

Having vision brings a wonderful clarity to your life and direction.

Following the advice of the gurus, making a 10-year plan, setting goals, and working to achieve them--that gives you an insight that others don't have. A sense of purpose. Certainty. You know without a doubt what you will become and the steps you need to take to get there.

This sense of planned destiny, of purposeful decision, gets you up in the morning. It propels you through the day. Days become steps. Weeks become legs of a climb. Months become another steppe achieved. And the mountain is conquered.

I envy my friends who have such a clear purpose. They seem to stride confidently from one room to the next, sure of their purpose and goal. Their sure-footed certainty speaks of the clarity of visionary leadership that is coveted by all who dare to lead a group into the future.

Having vision brings a wonderful clarity to your life and direction.

But not to me. Not today. Not for a long while now.

My visionary clarity has been clouded by a spiritual cataract. My sense of purposeful direction is blindfolded. My halting, faulting, stumbling steps betray an uncertainty about what tomorrow may bring, much less next year, and God forbid that I should actually try to predict what may come next decade.

There are a number of reasons for that. A number of circumstances that have brought my condition about. Stumbling blocks have become monoliths. Molehills have become mountains. I can no longer see into the future, and I am reduced to doing only what the day requires.

And I have found that having uncertainty brings a wonderful clarity to your faith.

Do I trust in God to provide me with strength for today? My strength is gone, so I have no choice but to believe in that promise, and so I do.

Do I believe that He is able to provide for me and my family what the needs of today demand? And that when tomorrow becomes today, He will be able to do it all over again? Since I can no longer see tomorrow, I have to trust that He's already there.

Do I trust that He is a faithful guide, leading me ever forward on the narrow and treacherous path, and that He will bring me to the good destination He has chosen?

Do I trust that Christ has come so that I may have life, and have life to the full?

Do I trust Christ?

Every sure and certain thing that I had planned has been revealed to be neither sure nor certain. When once I had been certain that I could plan my way into the future, I am shocked and frightened to learn that my vision has become so clouded that I can only see what is right in front of me.

And there stands Christ. My only remaining option. He who alone is Lord. He who alone knows the future. He who alone knows the path. He who alone provides. He who alone is the light on the path, the Word in my ears, the quieter of storms, the giver of life, the peace that passes all understanding. He is there, sure and certain in flesh and blood, in water and word. Unwavering. Unchanging.

I don't understand Him, but I see Him. Clearly.

And I have found that having uncertainty brings a wonderful clarity to your faith.

Taught a lesson by a philosopher

2012-01-07T15:14:00.003-05:00

"The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is obvious enough. The tragic hero stats within the ethical. He lets an expression of the ethical have its telos in a higher expression of the ethical; he reduces the ethical relation between father and son, or daughter and father, to a sentiment that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of the ethical life."--Soren Kierkegaarad, Fear and Trembling

I just plucked this book off my shelf, opened to this page, and read this paragraph.

And to be honest, it shredded me. Just shredded me.

And I don't know precisely why.

But I believe it's because of this:

The "tragic hero" looks at life sentimentally. He says to himself, "Well, it's a rough lot, but I'll endure it." His actions convey that yes, he knows he's suffering, but he's going to endure it patiently. He looks at himself in the mirror and says, "What a fine, heroic figure I am! How many men could endure the hardships I have endured? And yet here I am, carrying on boldly in the face of adversity."

He sheds crocodile tears, but even those are for show. For himself and for others.

Abraham, though, is the man of faith. And he wastes no time making himself the tragic figure. He simply hears God, and he obeys God. He believes that what God says is good. "This is no hardship," he says, "this is God's good will! I won't pretend to understand it, but neither will I allow myself to be pitied. I have God, and He is always good. I have no need for pity."

And here's the rub:

I've spent a lot of time and effort throughout my life in playing the tragic hero.

How much better to simply be a man of quiet, humble faith. That simply walks where God leads. That believes and does not doubt that God has a redemptive plan for all hardships, all difficulties, all trials.

In other words, the man who has learned to stop looking in the mirror and congratulating himself on what a fine fellow he has proved to be under pressure, and instead simply looks to God for all that He declares to be "good."

On being and becoming truly missional: a personal journey

2011-09-22T16:24:00.000-04:00

Today I was pointed to an excellent and thought-provoking blog post by a former classmate of mine hit the web. The Reverend Doctor Lucas Woodford posted, “Getting the Message Out or Getting the Message Right?” on his blog at http://thisweconfess.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/getting-the-message-out-or-getting-the-message-right/. I encourage you to go and read it, as it forms the impetus for this, the first blog post I have felt compelled to write in many, many months.

I’m writing today as a man on a rough and difficult journey. It’s a journey in which I’ve seen my dreams shattered and the future of my vocation threatened. On this journey, I’ve been driven to reevaluate basic, fundamental, underlying assumptions of mission and ministry, and I’ve been repeatedly shocked to discover how much I’ve had to learn. I’ve gone from a man who had specific notions about what I wanted to achieve and where I wanted to be in ten years’ time to a man who wakes up every day not knowing what the challenges of the day will bring and not being entirely certain if I have the wherewithal to face them.

In short, in encountering the real, stubborn face of pastoral ministry, my grandiose dreams and plans of “mission” have been burnt from me.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I believed myself to be fully missional. I spouted statements to fellow pastors that were both bold and brash. I believed that to be missional, one simply had to follow the standard playbook: Attract people to church with a worship band with a cutting-edge sound, relax the unwritten rules of worship to allow people to feel more comfortable, dress down, preach relevant sermons on topics that people wanted to hear, generate a buzz in the community through advertising and events.

But beyond that, I believed that the traditional church was dying. Populated only by selfish, self-centered, out-of-touch pew-warmers that Amish-ly insisted upon living in a different era, those in the traditional church were not interested in proclaiming Christ to their neighbor. In pastoral gatherings, I advocated simply shutting down dying churches and giving their resources to churches that were genuinely reaching out.

I wasn’t the only one. Surrounded by a circle of like-minded, missional friends, we talked of turning the world upside-down. No goal was unattainable, and in fact the size of the vision we had for the church was the marker of the degree of our faith in Christ. Small pastors with small faith had small dreams. Big faith was demonstrated by big visions. Though we did not suppose life and ministry would be without challenges, we did believe that through the strength of our leadership and the courage of our vision, we would prevail and people would flock to our churches. Many would be saved. Mission would be accomplished.

And then something happened. I failed at planting a church. And on the heels of that failure I found myself relegated to a small, traditional church in rural America. A church that in many ways had her glory years behind her.

Though some will tell you otherwise, I took my time. I watched. I observed. I remembered my lessons from seminary in which I was advised to learn the church and community before introducing changes. I bumped my nose on numerous unwritten rules. I barked my shins against unspoken expectations. And in the process, I formed, evaluated, and re-formed many, many ideas as to what “mission” looked like in the life of the church.

In observation and good old-fashioned trial and error, God began to teach me the dangers of substituting activity for mission. I watched other churches busily grow and thrive under the influence of capable leaders, but when I searched for indications of people growing in Christ, I saw very little. These churches taught me that you can draw a crowd by being an exciting place to be in, but having crowds in and of itself did little to accomplish true church growth—the growth of a church community in their understanding of Christ’s redemption.

Again, through observation and trial and error, God also taught me the dangers of substituting new methods for mission. Very early on, I recognized that while I could—if I so chose—by claims of pastoral authority and by sheer will force new methods upon the church. I could—again, if I so chose—force the church to have a very different public face: making worship look radically different than it had been, changing the old, staid church name to something new and far more catchy. I could re-brand the church using images and techniques and technology. But I wanted the people to love Jesus. Stripping away their history and identity would only serve to distance them from the church and from genuine mission.

Through observation, insight, and yes, error, I came to realize that I had been guilty of the sin of idolatry. I had idolized methods. I had idolized vision. I had idolized mission. And true to form, idols always lie. They always promise what they cannot deliver. The always draw you further away from—and not closer to—the One you truly need to be close to.

It was as a pastor that I finally learned the true, undying value of grace: that though God never denied that I was a mighty sinner, nevertheless in Christ He had bound Himself to me, and pledged to remain united to me for all eternity. I learned to put to death my hopes of redeeming myself through the works-righteousness of activity. I learned to confess my sin of putting faith in the greatness of my faith. I learned to hear His voice and believe Him when He said, “I now forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” I learned to covet not a bigger, better, fancier church, but the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, given and shed for the forgiveness of my sin. I learned to lay aside my idols and instead run to the places where He had promised His Spirit would always be working: His Word and His Sacraments.

In other words, I learned to live with Jesus. To trust in His love for me, rather than trying to prove my love by living for Him.

And still, through the depths of pain that only dying to self genuinely produce, I realized that all along I had really only wanted one thing: I wanted people to be redeemed by and know and love the same Jesus that had redeemed, known, and loved me. And I realized that while Jesus had indeed used many different activities, many different methods, and many different technologies to draw me ever closer to Himself, that there had always been one, single, underlying common denominator in it all: the voice of the One, True God calling out to me, saying, “Come unto me, you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.”

I still consider myself missional, but not because I want to use a particular method or approach, but because I want to tell people about Jesus Christ. When I see complacency inside the church, I desire the complacent to grow in Christ. When I see the lost in my community struggle through their lives without Jesus, I want them to know His peace. When I see people die without Jesus, I am heartbroken over the future they are denied, but could have had. I want to spend my life with Jesus telling people about Jesus.

As to what method is used to proclaim Him, I’m unconcerned. It doesn’t matter much to me if a rock band is playing or if a pipe organ is thundering. Not as long as people are clearly and deliberately pointed away from their idols and clearly and deliberately shown Christ. As long as they are drawn away from focusing on the glitz and glamour of what we do and shown the stark, humbling reality of what He has done, I will be satisfied.

But I am no longer guilty of the sin of idolizing mission, because I have learned to take my focus off my work of mission and instead look to God’s work of mission to me in Christ. I have learned that being “missional” is simply this: to point people to search for Christ in the things that He used to find me. In other words, to proclaim Christ in His Word and to offer Christ in His Sacraments.

The beauty of brokennes and grace

2011-06-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

Blessed is the one who has no one to trust in but God alone.

I recall meeting a pastor from Nigeria once, long ago. As he spoke at my (then) home church one Sunday, he said some words that became deeply imprinted upon my heart . . . words that shaped my thinking. He spoke of the poverty of the Christians in his home country lived in. Even with their little resources, they were nevertheless a joyful people. A people that loved to proclaim the goodness of the God who had redeemed them. They were a people who had nothing but Jesus Christ.

It moved me so much that I tracked him down as the service was ending. Tapping him on the shoulder, I waited for him to turn to me, and then I spoke words to him. I said,

"People all over the world think that Americans are rich. We have money. We have nice homes. We have our own cars. We have large church buildings. But you come to us and say that you and your people have nothing but Jesus."

"We are not rich . . . you are rich."

And this gracious man smiled the broadest smile, spread his arms open wide, and embraced me in a true African hug. He laughed a large, joy-filled laugh, and his laughter was infectious.

That day, he and I spoke the same language. Not English . . . we both knew that quite well. But we spoke the language of the ones who realize the gift of being broken, poor, and being able to find comfort in nothing but Jesus Christ alone.

Since that day, I have had many people come into my office at church. Broken and disheartened, they have all said the same thing, "I feel like I have nowhere to turn but to Jesus Christ."

And inevitably, I have broken into a broad smile, spread my arms open wide, and embraced them. With joy in my heart, I tell them how deeply they just blessed me by saying that. And I tell them what a great gift they have been given: The gift of finding true riches in life's poorest circumstances.

Hebrews 12:2, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

The world has no shame that God cannot turn to glory. The world has no sadness that God cannot turn to joy. Because it is in those very moments that we find our idols have no power to save, our strength has no ability to lift us up, and all our wealth has no value.

It is in those moments that we see Christ most clearly, and we find that He dearly loves us with a love that cannot be broken.

Just for Stephanie

2011-02-26T12:00:00.001-05:00

Just a little note to my lovely wife . . . because that's the kind of romantic fool I am.

The Proclaimers - I Would Walk 500 Miles
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Perfectly unable to shut up

2011-01-11T10:21:00.000-05:00

Jeremiah 20:7-9 ⁷ O LORD, you deceived; me, and I was deceived you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. ⁸ Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the LORD has brought me insult and reproach all day long. ⁹ But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.

There is a curious truth revealed in the prophet Jeremiah’s life; the truth that at one point or another proclaiming the life-giving Word of God could (will?) cost you very dearly. And at that point, every fiber of your natural being will command you to zip your lip. It will seem advice most wise. It will seem most comfortable. It will seem most sensible.

But you will be perfectly unable to shut up.

And there you will stand, frantically clasping your hands over your mouth, eyes widening with horror that you are unable to control or contain the Words of God that come tumbling unbidden off your lips, a spiritually sanctified Tourette’s. You will wish you had never started to speak. You will regret the coming emotional pain that your words have now made inevitable.

This is the humanly undesirable flipside to the Holy Spirit being a consuming fire. Everyone wants to see the raging fire burn, but no one wants to be personally consumed by it. We live lives that desperately cry out for God’s influence and direction, but strive mightily against Him when He actually does take charge.

We want to be in control. To determine what is spoken when. To pick and to choose this Word over that, to boldly proclaim this utterance and quietly ignore another. And all along, we deceive ourselves into believing that the raging forest fire of the Holy Spirit is safely contained behind our handcrafted firewall. God is safely in His box.

But fires need to be fed. To contain a fire is to ensure that it will eventually die out.

So which would you rather have? The dying embers and cool ash of a nicely contained, predictable God? Or would you rather welcome the uncontained wildfire of the Holy Spirit that turns this way and that and who’s flames will on occasion burn even the hand of the one who wields it?

Do you want to trust God to be God . . . or would you rather try to be Him yourself?

While I'm away . . .

2011-01-10T19:13:00.000-05:00

Greetings, dear reader!

I've always wanted to say that. It sounds so . . . so writerly.

But to the point at hand: I want to take a moment or two to explain the dearth of recent posts and then to explain why that (most likely) will continue.

I have found myself in a position of needing to be employed on a part-time basis outside of the church. This has put somewhat of a crimp on my schedule, and to be honest I've found it physically and mentally draining, as well. As I largely use my blog as a place for creative, meditative, and spiritually-led writing, I have found that as of late I've had neither the time nor, frankly, the mental energy to put metaphorical pen to paper.

So while this is not by any means a good-bye, this is a notice that my blog posts will be a bit more sparse than what they already have been. At such time when I can get a good grasp on how to ensure my family has the time from me they need, my church is being served to the best of my ability, my secular work is being done for the glory of God and the betterment of the company I work for, AND I find myself with the spare time, energy, and emotion to blog forth . . . well, things here will be a bit quiet.

I look forward to the day when we can speak again. Until then, I'd appreciate your prayers as I learn once again to settle into a new and demanding schedule.

A monumental realization

2010-12-08T14:11:00.001-05:00

Last night the 2 year old woke up and crawled into bed with us. After dealing with him thrashing about and endangering his little infant sister, I made the discovery that he apparently just wanted some one-on-one snuggle time. He needed that affection.

So I dutifully took blanket and pillow out to the living room, leading him by the hand, and we snuggled up on the couch together. And then it began.

He says, "Buzz! Buzz!". "You want to watch Toy Story? Now??" It's 2:30 in the morning. But he wants to, and I figure that he'll just fall asleep with me as we watch it. So I pop in our old antiquated VHS copy of the original Toy Story, and hit play.

Then the 4 year old shows up. And wants milk. I get her and the 2 year old both some milk and together we all snuggle under one blanket at 2:30 in the morning to watch Toy Story.

Then the 6 year old walks out into the living room. He too, wants milk, but I encourage him to share with his sister. And together, all four of us snuggle under one blanket at 2:30 in the morning to watch Toy Story.

And none of them fall asleep. It is a magical, spontaneous, wondrous time of father-child bonding. A twisted and tender moment, just the very kind that tends to stick in your mind for years. A Neujahr-style bizzarro family movie night.

With these thoughts now racing through my head, I begin to recall all the various bonding moments done in the wee hours since our oldest daughter was born. There are the memories of croup, rocking infants in a steam-filled bathroom. The memories of sleeping with one eye open and one hand on a vomit bucket for the child with the flu. Finding a bed empty and then finding the sleepwalking child in the yard. Shushing and cooing away the frantic half-awake fears brought on by nightmares.

There are memories of discovering a child in the kitchen eating the last of the cheesecake because "I'm a tiger." Of rushing into a bedroom at the sound of a thump and finding a child still asleep, but fallen on the hard wood floor. There are late-night diapers and feedings for itty-bitty ones feeling either heavy or empty and early-morning counseling and consolation for bigger ones feeling the same.

Memories of running a vacuum to provide enough white noise for a crabby child to sleep. Memories of midnight drives to rock a baby to sleep. Memories of nosebleeds on pillows, of cough medicines and prayers for it to work, of children creeping unbidden into my bed and of me blearily laying down in theirs at their small-voiced, big-eyed requests. There is forever printed upon my mind and body the loving service of the routine awakenings and the panicked adrenaline of the emergency ones.

And in this flood of memories, I came to a profound and great revelation. The force of this new insight overwhelmed me, and under its rocking blow I was moved nearly to tears.

I realized I haven't had a decent night's sleep in nearly 20 years!!

When life gets "Rocky"

2010-11-29T12:33:00.000-05:00

2 Corinthians 4:8-9 ⁸ We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.

I know the Rocky films are from a bygone era, but they still tell a compelling story. One that makes me think.

Think about the two really good ones, Rocky 1 and Rocky 2. The most endearing feature about Rocky Balboa—the characteristic that garnered him the most praise—was not his fighting ability; that was regarded as being amateur level at best. No, the thing that amazed commentator, spectator, and opponent was that Rocky kept getting back up.

That’s the part of the story that amazes me, as well.

It had to hurt, lying on the canvas, knowing that the pain would subside if he just stayed down. It had to hurt, knowing that he wasn’t really winning the fight but just wearing down his opponent’s fists with his face. And it had to hurt, bleeding and broken and one eye swollen shut, fatigue setting in, muscles unwilling to cooperate, brain nearly incapable of forming a cohesive thought.

And still he got back up.

Why? Why not just quit? Stay down? Throw in the towel? Everything would be so much easier if he would just lay on the mat for a measly 10 seconds. No one would think ill of him. Everyone would agree that was the sensible thing to do. Perhaps even the wisest thing to do.

And still he got back up.

When I see him struggle back to his feet, grasping the top rope for support, I still cheer every time. Every. Single. Time. Because I see a man with nothing to prove other than he can take a hit and get back up again. I see a man willing to take enormous amounts of abuse and pain and suffering if it means he can take a stand for a principle; the principle that you cannot beat me until I give in.

I see Christ.

I see Christ in me.

There are great patches of time when life hurts, and hurts bad. When confusion and pain and anxiety and uncertainty all conspire to force you to the mat, to make you swallow the bitter pill of defeat. But those times cannot beat you while you still cling to Christ. They cannot beat you until you decide to stop clinging to Him and instead weakly accept defeat.

Yes, you’ll look to all the world like you’re still losing. Beaten and bloody. Hardly able to form a coherent thought. Swaying on your feet . . . but standing in Christ.

2 Corinthians 4:8-9 ⁸ We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.

Are you hard pressed on every side? Christ supports you, and therefore you cannot be crushed.

Are you perplexed? Christ loves you, therefore you do not need to despair.

Are you persecuted? Christ has bound Himself to you and will not abandon you.

Are you struck down? Christ has redeemed you, and therefore you cannot be destroyed.

Christ is in you. He is with you today. And today He will help you get back up.

What I signed up for

2010-11-20T19:31:00.004-05:00

My dear Lord Jesus,

Thou art mine; therefore, I wish to be Thine.

All that I possess,

my body and my soul,

my strength and my gifts,

and all that I do,

my entire life,

shall be consecrated to Thee,

to Thee alone.

Lay on me any burden Thou pleasest,

I shall gladly bear it.

Lead me anywhere,

through sorrow or joy,

through good fortune or misfortune,

through shame or honor,

through favor of men or their disfavor,

grant me a long life, or should I die an early death,

--I shall be satisfied with anything.

Lead the way, and I shall follow.

-C.F.W. Walther, Law and Gospel, pg 78

Learning from others

2010-11-18T14:05:00.000-05:00

It's common understanding that we learn from others. Teachers are the "others" that kids learn from. Experienced parents are the "others" that new parents learn from. We learn new ideas, material, information, and habits from watching, listening, and heeding the instruction of others.

Oftentimes, those "others" will actually be quite similar to us. They'll have the same tastes and desires. We'll probably share a common ethnic or religious background with them. But what's often underestimated is the value of learning from someone who is truly "other". Someone outside your circle. Someone who doesn't think quite the same way you do, someone who doesn't necessarily have the same goals or values.

As I prepare a sermon, I try to get as much data as possible in my head regarding a certain Bible text. My typical plan is to first translate from Greek or Hebrew and then begin to consult commentaries. And as a LCMS Lutheran, I simply can't recommend Concordia's Big Blue Book (technically, they are the "Concordia Commentary" series) commentaries enough. They are scholarly, faithfully Lutheran, and richly profitable for Bible study and sermon preparation. But the only problem is that there aren't enough of them. Not yet. It will take years, maybe even decades, before the entire Bible is covered by this excellent series.

But that very lack is what drove me to realize afresh the value of learning not only from within a circle of shared backgrounds, but from outside it, as well. In my search for valuable and time-honored exposition of the Scriptures, I stumbled across an online version of John Calvin's Biblical commentaries and found them to be *gasp!* profitable for my studies.

Yes, you heard that correctly. A Lutheran--an LCMS Lutheran, no less--has learned to value God's truth that is expounded by John Calvin.

I find value in John Calvin because he's from outside my circle. It's not because I always agree with him; I don't. It's not because he is a better exegete or scholar than any other man in the history of the Church; he isn't. But it is because reading Calvin forces me to think critically. As I read his exposition of Scripture I become aware of how his theology drives his understanding and application of Scripture, and the difference between our theologies draws me into a dialogue with the centuries-dead theologian that sharpens my Lutheran grasp of Scriptures even as it hones my appreciation for the rich diversity of people who are nevertheless knitted together into the Church, the mystical Body of Jesus Christ.

"All truth is God's truth." I am grateful for a man like John Calvin who brings me gems of God's truth. Because where he agrees with Scripture, Calvin speaks God's truth. Where grace is upheld, where Christ is honored, where Law and Gospel are rightly divided, John Calvin proclaims the pure truth of God. But he does so as if in a different language, with different words and phrases than I am used to hearing. And the beauty of hearing God's truth in Calvin's tongue is refreshing and comforting; like seeing my home in a satellite picture; like hearing a favorite hymn in a different language.

Always remember that you can learn from others outside your circle, from others who don't talk or think quite the same way you do. It will keep you humble, it will keep you kind, and it will keep you in constant awe that no matter where genuine truth is told, you will be hearing God's truth.

Pastor, heal thyself

2010-11-02T13:19:00.002-04:00

One of the curious, yet recurring, challenges of pastoring is learning to listen to your own words. No, not in the context of hearing yourself speak, but in hearing the words of advice and counsel you gave to others be given back to you.

It happens to me with frightening regularity. I have studied and prepared a sermon meant to proclaim God’s counsel to my congregation, and deliver Godly, Scripture guidance, correction, and comfort. Or at other times I have chatted with a friend and church member after worship or a meeting and addressed a concern of theirs with a Spirit-given Scriptural response. And then a week, or a day, or perhaps maybe just an hour later I will be the one in a crisis of fear or doubt, and often—just often enough to notice—it will happen that somebody will give back to me the same counsel and comfort I had just given out to others. My wife does it. My parishioners do it. Even my children have at times done it.

And in my geeky sci-fi mind, at that moment I can almost feel two alternate realities developing. In one potential reality, I brush off the advice saying, “Yes, I did say that to you. But my situation is different,” and thus unhinge a great evil within me that inevitably leads me into the worst of all sins: a pastor that believes God’s Word is intended for everybody else and not for him.

But in the other potential reality, I wrestle with accepting my own advice. A brief but epic struggle occurs within the depths of my soul as I determine whether I was passionately sincere when I first spoke those words I now hear given back to me, or if I was merely parroting a polite, Biblical-sounding lie. My flesh wants to disregard my own words, but my conscience and God’s Spirit within me demand I must not. And with heroic effort, my flesh is defeated and I humbly—and perhaps grudgingly, to be honest—accept the Godly counsel that has managed to boomerang itself back to me once again.

And I’ve realized something: It’s not so much a matter of listening to my own advice as it is a matter of listening to God’s. At one point, He spoke through me to give counsel to another. Should it surprise me when He uses another to give that same counsel back to me?

Message to tired pastors everywhere, and yes to their people, too

2010-10-14T13:53:00.000-04:00

I run a small blog, and don't get tons of visitors. That's okay, because what I post here I do for the sake of myself and those few but faithful readers who value what God might have to speak to them through my meager words. But I do keep track of how people arrive at here on these pages, and month in and month out there is one consistent search phrase that has led pastors to my site:

"I'm tired of being a pastor"

I know why that search lands pastors here. I wrote a blog post about that very topic a while ago, detailing my struggles with disappointment, with burnout, with striving to find the energy to continue on preaching Christ's precious Gospel. And how that desire which we feel should be a burning flame sometimes sputters to a cold ember.

Pastors, I know what you're going through. I know the depth of pain that prompts you to publicly cry out in anguish and the pressure that only allows you to say it via Google. I've felt the desire to find someone to share my burdens, and I've turned to the anonymity of the internet to do so. You're tired, you're despondent, you despair of the uncertainty of God's calling and even of God's gifting. You're fighting an uphill battle, and you wonder if you will ever, EVER, be given the blessing of seeing fruit produced from your work in the vineyard.

Pastor, take it from one who's been there and will no doubt be there again: You are burned out. For too long you've been operating under your own strength. Your great love for God and your life's sole desire to see people impacted by the same Gospel that has saved you has resulted in your tireless, constant work. But it's work that has changed from when you began. It's now work that the Enemy of the church has very carefully, very subtly shifted off your true focus.

You used to work because Christ called you. You used to preach Christ because you could not keep quiet. Now you work because you want to see fruit.

Not that spiritual fruit is bad . . . it's not. Not in the least. It's what we celebrate. It adds a savor to the work we do that encourages us to keep on keeping on. But it's not your job to produce it. And if you are deep enough in despair to proclaim your weariness to a search engine, I will be you dollars to donuts that your despair is because you so badly want to see fruit that you've forgotten that God--and not you--is the only One who can cause a planted seed to grow and ripen into fruit ripe for harvest.

You've looked with longing for fruit and believed Satan's lie that if it's not growing, you're not faithful. That your Kingdom contributions are worthless. That God can't use you any longer, and that He hasn't been using you for a long, long time.

You've been lied to, and you have believed the lie.

Pastor, my heart breaks for you. Right now I'm choking back tears as I think of you and your dashed dreams and shattered hopes. I know that statistically many of you will continue on working, hoping to work your way out of burnout. I know that out of those who dig deep for the strength to go on another day, many will eventually turn to sexual sin, sabotaging their own ministry just to be shed of the burden. Many others will resign in discouragement. A few will continue to serve behind the facade of a smile, but inside will be dry as dust, faith shriveling day by day under a spiritual drought from which they will never recover. None--let that word soak in--NONE will get through burnout through their own efforts.

Pastor, let me say this to you: I appreciate what you do. You are operating in areas of God's Kingdom that I could never reach, understand, or see. You are sowing Gospel seeds into fields that I will never visit. You are making my precious Christ known to a generation that I will never meet. I place an incredibly high value on you, on your work, upon God's call on your life. I applaud you, and in my prayers I thank God for you.

I appreciate your work, I affirm God's calling on your life, and I am still telling you to STOP. Stop now before it gets too late. Drop the facade, do whatever you have to do, and stop. Rest. Get away from the office and from the demands and from the pressure, take your Bible, go to a secret, quiet place, and get to know Jesus Christ once again. Refresh your heart in Him. Remember the passion you once felt and confess all the reasons and sins that have kept you from serving with zeal.

For God's sake, man . . . take a Sabbath.

For your sake, pastor.

For the sake of your family.

For the sake of your church.

Start today, right now. Walk out of the office and get alone with God, even if it's just for the afternoon. Tell someone what you're going to do and then drop off the face of the earth. God needs this time with you alone, free from all the distractions of ministry, to water your soul.

Take a Sabbath, cry out to God, get honest with Him, and you will find that He will get honest with you. I promise that all the cares and concerns will still be there when you get back. But I also promise that when you are done speaking to God, He will speak to you. And if you listen to His voice, if you do not turn away, if you allow Him to be God and renounce your attempts to take His job, He will refresh you.

He will water your dry soul.

He will lift your discouraged spirit.

He will repair your shattered faith.

He will be your God, and you will be His servant.

God bless you, pastor . . . may you find in Him the rest you need.

Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable

2010-10-11T16:57:00.000-04:00

I have a new-found appreciation for being uncomfortable.

It seems like it's been years that we've been living in a state of permanent discomfort. No, not because of our ratty old couch (which should be hitting the curb this week, yay!), but a more emotional discomfort caused by life's trials and tribulations. Call it stress if you wish, but for me it's been something more like the result of a deliberate, Divine act of pulling me apart from the world.

Imagine a vine: Its tendrils are seated firmly and comfortably deep, deep into its surroundings.
The vine needs this for stability, for nourishment. I suppose the vine has concluded that it would not be able to live without being firmly attached to where it lives.

Now consider a Christian: Like the vine, your typical Christian becomes very attached to where it lives. Sinking down roots, the Christian lives and works in a community, doing so for God's glory and the salvation of man. The Christian forms meaningful relationships with others that bring benefit both to himself as well as to them. He thanks God for all that He has given, and praises God for the blessings of life and living.

But eventually, even the most devout Christian begins to believe that he can't live if his roots were pulled up. That the emotional and financial nourishment that his perceived stability brings must remain intact in order for life to continue. His sense of living is tied directly to his sense of comfort in knowing his surroundings well.

But the Christian forgets that he is not the vine . . . he is merely the branch.

I'm not the vine. I'm not. Christ is. My job is not to draw my comfort from my surroundings, but rather receive nourishment from Christ. And while all the things that make me comfortable are good and gratifying and God-given, they are not my source of life and living.

So in a bizarre twist, I'm trying to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. To wonder what happens next. To feel displaced in the world. Because when this happens, I am more likely to recognize that my true source of comfort is Christ. The vine--and not my surroundings--gives me the nourishment I truly need.

Regarding my announcement in church yesterday: My season here appears to be drawing to a close

2010-10-04T12:12:00.000-04:00

There are seasons in every aspect of life. We all know this, and for the most part we accept it and often even embrace it. After all, who doesn’t love to see the changing colors of the leaves as they herald the arrival of a new season of warm fires, comfortable sweaters, and quiet evenings with friends? We’re grateful to God for giving us those kinds of pleasant seasons. Even when they come to an end, we are grateful for the gifts He gave and the memories we have.

For some time now, the leaders of Our Saviour and I have been seeing signs that indicate God might be drawing my season as pastor here to a close. First and foremost is the declining state of our church finances. As a church, we have been anxious about it, we have been diligent about managing resources well, and we have been prayerful. And yet finally, after many, many months of carefully observing financial trends, Chairman Mike Brinkman, Head Elder Mike McNamara, and I met and mutually agreed that it would be fairest to the church and fairest to my family and me if I were to very actively seek another call.

What you should know regarding that decision:

The decision was not made lightly, nor was there any pleasure in it. It pained all of us, and we are very aware that it will pain you, as well. We are sorry for that.
The council has agreed to maintain salary and benefits at current levels until December 31^st, 2010. This in and of itself is an indication that we are trusting God to provide what we ourselves cannot.
I have not resigned my call, nor has it been terminated. I will remain your pastor until the Lord makes it clear that He has chosen me to serve elsewhere. If that means even after December 31^st with no visible means of support, so be it.
The council and I are investigating the best possible way to have a pastor continue Word and Sacrament ministry at Our Saviour in the event God has prepared a call for me at another church. I promise you will be cared for.
I do not currently have another call, and all reports indicate that calls are somewhat difficult to come by as of late in the LCMS. I would appreciate it if you would join me in prayer that God would work in a timely fashion.

Though every one of us will almost certainly feel denial, sadness, and even anger over this situation, I encourage you to remember this: I bear no ill will towards anyone regarding this decision, and neither should you. We remain Christ's family. Let us trust in God our Father to decide what is best for us, and let us have faith in His good and perfect will.

It is true that the Lord does seem to be drawing my season here to a close. And yes, it is true that this makes me . . . well, it makes me grieve like I have lost a family member to death. But I encourage you to remember that where God is at work, He is working to bring good into our lives. God has been at work among us. He has made us His very dwelling place. As long as His Word is preached and His Sacraments administered, you can be assured that He is here, in this church, working to bring His good into your lives and your lives into His good.

Finally, I encourage you to a season of prayer. Chairman Mike Brinkman has felt the burden to begin a weekly prayer ministry that will not only offer prayers for the Lord’s will be done for myself and for Our Saviour, but for all who need His comfort, assurance, and healing. From now to at least the beginning of Advent, he and I invite you to gather together as the family of Christ and pray. 7:00 p.m. Wednesday evenings, here at Our Saviour.

Cowardice or patience?

2010-09-29T12:21:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I’m a coward but I’ll mistake it for patience. Rather a flipside to my blog post from yesterday. And still this, too, is a dilemma for me.

By nature I’m more contemplative than combative. And while it is true that this orientation does give me certain benefits, it also means that after a confrontation very, very often I’m the one left thinking, “THAT’S what I should have said! Why didn’t I think of that earlier?!?!” Like the Apostle Paul, I tend towards a mild demeanor face-to-face and bold when I have some distance.

Part of that is driven by my pastoral patience in wanting people to come to repentance. But if I’m to be honest with you (and perhaps more importantly, honest with myself), some of that is driven by fear.

There are times when a strong word is demanded. A forceful word. Often times the word that is needed is a word of rebuke. That time could come in a very visible public setting, or it might come in a private session. But inevitably when that time comes I feel fear.

I fear many things at that point. What if I’m wrong, and this person isn’t in sin? I’ll have rebuked them for no reason and caused them embarrassment. What if the proper time for a rebuke is not right now? How do I bring it up later without feeling awkward? What if I just make things worse? Do I have the authority to police everybody’s sins and monitor their every behavior? And finally . . . what if the rebuke is driven by my own frustration and not by God’s standards?

Decades into my life and years into my ministry, and this is still something I am trying to learn. I have learned, however, that when I am facing personal attack God has instructed me to turn the other cheek. To suffer silently. But when the conscience and spiritual well-being of my neighbor is being threatened by the sinful actions of another, there is no doubt whatsoever that decisive action is required. When God says, “Speak now for the sake of the faith of others!” there should be no hesitation. And yet I will often hold my tongue and try to convince myself later that I was being patient.

It’s a poor sort of consolation. For when the faith and conscience of the sheep is being threatened, the good shepherd acts immediately to drive away the wolf. That never feels like love to me. I want to be patient with the wolf and wait for him to come to repentance. In the meantime, however, the sheep are scattered and the wolf continues to confirm himself in his own sin, heaping condemnation upon his own head.

That’s not love. It’s not love for the sheep. And curiously, it’s not even true love for the wolf. When the time for speaking boldly has come, the time for patience has past. And in that fleeting moment if I can swallow my fear and open my mouth and trust that the Lord’s words will spill out the sheep will see a shepherd who defends them despite his fear and the wolf might just also be shocked into the realization of his own sin, leading him to repentance. In the end, everybody wins because God’s Kingdom has advanced. His perfect love for sheep, for wolf, and even for a timid-mouthed pastor has driven out all fear.

Lord God, teach me to be patient when I cannot, and teach me to be courageous when I must not be patient.

Patience or cowardice?

2010-09-28T12:13:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I’m patient with people, but I’ll mistake that for cowardice. This is something of a dilemma for me.

See, I know something bad about nearly everyone I know. I’ve witnessed their public sin. I’ve heard their struggles with private sin. And I desperately want for them to come to repentance, to leave that besetting sin behind them and live a more holy life. A life that doesn’t threaten to tear them apart.

And I freely confess: I want to happen NOW. There is nothing more agonizing than seeing a person struggle when you know they can be freed. And I have this sneaking suspicion that if I were to just get into their faces for a moment and confront them with the reality of their sin, I could manipulate them enough to leave it behind. At least on the surface. In front of me. As we gather in church.

If I was just bold enough, I really do believe that I could force a situation where they would at least learn to mask their sin in public, but that’s not really what I want, is it? I don’t want to train people to hide sin’s decaying rot under a shiny veneer of righteousness. I want them to bring sin into the light and let it be killed off. For that to happen God has to work; for Him to work I must be patient.

So fully knowing people’s sin, I continue to minister to them. Patiently preaching the full counsel of God’s Word. Praying that they will be delivered from their struggles. Waiting for the day when the Holy Spirit has prepared them for repentance, waiting for the season where the Lord has brought His fruit to full ripeness and He commands, “Now you, worker, go and harvest what I have prepared.” I am patient for that day.

But sometimes I’ll mistake my own patience for cowardice. I’ll convince myself that I’m not truly waiting on God but that in reality I’m just hiding from confrontation. That somehow, if I’m not in full confrontational prophet mode all hours of the day I’m not living up to my calling.

That’s a lie. It’s a lie that I’ve told myself. It’s a lie others have told about me. It’s a lie that’s been told about God. Perhaps the most impatient man in the Bible—the Apostle Peter—says in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

Sometimes God’s patience is mistaken for weakness. Sometimes I mistake my own patience for cowardice. But in truth we both have the same ultimate goal: that souls be saved. That lives be redeemed. That persistent sinners be delivered from the shackles that so cruelly bind them and they walk upon the earth as precious saints.

That’s not something that occurs in a day, and it’s not something that I can force to happen. It is a goal that often takes a literal lifetime to achieve. And it is a day for which God is willing to be patient.

And if He is willing to be patient . . . then I am willing also.

Return to blogging: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax

2010-09-15T14:47:00.001-04:00

House of Heroes "God Save The Foolish Kings" lyrics video from Gotee Records on Vimeo.

The rather ludicrous title of this my first blog post in a month alludes to the disjointed, disconnected nature of what I’m about to write. I freely confess that this post is far less for your benefit than it is mine. But at the same time I hope that my insights may prove beneficial to you at some time in your life, as well.

About a month ago, I realized that for a long, long time—far too long, really—I had been carrying a weight that I was never given to carry. When the Lord calls a pastor, He calls him to carry a number of burdens: the burden of proper distinction of Law and Gospel, the burden of publicly walking in righteousness and even more publicly clinging to the cross in the midst of personal unrighteousness. The Lord calls the pastor to carry the burden of the people; both their cares and concerns as well as the burden of the people themselves as they act sometimes as saint, sometimes as sinner. God calls pastors to the burdensome ministry of calling people to repentance, of comforting them with Gospel, and exhorting them to have Christ at the very center of their being and doing.

But not once, ever, does God call a pastor to carry the burden of the work only He can do. God entrusts work to pastors, but leaves the matter of results to Himself.

And yet . . . that’s the very load I was carrying. My own weak, frail, narrow shoulders tried to heft a yoke that only fits His strong, broad ones. I was trying to recreate the feat of Atlas, hefting the world upon my shoulders.

I held myself responsible for achieving results in an arena that God alone dwells: the transformation of hearts and the reigniting of a church.

It’s a long, lonely, fruitless, endless road to walk down. I got to the end of my rope and fell off, only to be caught by God Himself. In classic God fashion, He was apparently waiting for that moment to rescue me from my own foolishness. Waiting for me to wear myself out bashing my head against a wall so that I’d finally fall on my back; strength exhausted but with my eyes finally upward.

I’m not sure what happens next; my field of vision is extremely limited. I know what I can see: that my church is in a financial crunch the likes of which it has never seen before. That for all intents and purposes it is humanly impossible for them to continue forward with a full-time minister. And yet I also see that despite all odds God has indeed brought us forward step by halting step.

I also know what I believe: that God is always faithful, always true, always merciful, and always victorious. I have read and believe His promises that His church will endure, that His Gospel will go forth, that hearts and lives and people will be forever transformed from the inside-out as His redeeming work goes resolutely forth through His Word and through His Sacraments.

What I don’t know are those things beyond my ability to see. Those are the things that worry at me. Will God call me to another church? Has He prepared another man to take my mantle of ministry here? Will the people I love have a shepherd? Or has He been working to keep us here? Will we endure this as a light and momentary trouble? Will we have a story of an unforeseen, God-sized victory?

Where does my next paycheck come from? What happens on the day when it doesn’t? How can I find work in Michigan’s economy, and how can I create work if I can’t find it? What shall we eat? What shall we wear?

Let me say it again: I. Do. Not. Know. And it scares the death out of me.

But stronger in me than death is the One who has gone through death into life. Greater is the One who is in me than the one who is in the world. My fears must content themselves with cowering in the corner as fears do. I have no choice but to fling myself headlong into the maelstrom armed only with the knowledge that no matter what may come, it has already been prepared to bring good and not harm into my life.

My fears can take a flying leap. As a matter of fact, they have to, because I’m jumping off the mist-shrouded cliff hoping there’s water below that I can’t see. I’m leaping from a perfectly good airplane trusting that the chute will open at the proper time. I’m BASE jumping off the tower I’ve built to the Heavens in an attempt to see from the vantage point of God.

So for the time being, I’m doing what today demands. A little freelance writing to earn some money on the side and provide a wee bit of relief to the church’s financial burdens. Grocery shopping to feed the family. Prayer for the flock. Sermon preparation for Sunday. Catechism for new adult disciples as well as teenagers just beginning to make their parent’s faith their own. Listening for God’s voice. Trusting in His promises. Doing the things that I can, trusting Him for those things that I cannot.

God will have to work out the future alone. I'm pretty sure He can handle it far better than I.

Taking a short break from blogging

2010-08-09T12:28:00.000-04:00

Hello to anyone and everyone who stops by my blog to get some wisdom, insight, and to offer their own.

Just wanted to say thanks to you for reading what I post, and a double thanks to those who have taken time to interact.

And also wanted to let you know I'm going to take a short sabbatical from blogging. I'm in a personal season of life now that is calling for more rest and meditation than it does for reflection and proclamation. I plan on resuming blogging in about a month's time. Subscribe via RSS or an aggregate reader and you'll have immediate knowledge of when I put up a post again.

Thanks again. We'll see you in about a month.

Managing God's resources for ministry in a small town: Don't get your ducks into just any row

2010-07-05T15:13:00.000-04:00

When you’re a small church in a small town, you need to manage your resources well in order to keep your ministry on target. For us, that means careful attention to stewardship of our resources as well as the direction in which our resources are heading.

Now, stewardship you know about. You take care of what God has given you, use it responsibly, and use it for His purposes. So you keep an eye on your building and maintain it. You pay attention to giving patterns and trends so that you can plan appropriately for next year’s/season’s/month’s ministry. You keep an eye out for useful talents that members have and look for a person with a desire to serve.

But that direction thing . . . that can be tough. Small town/small churches have a kind of centrifugal force that’s born from long-term relationships. Now certainly that’s a great strength (and in all honesty is probably the single-most important factor in how small towns/small churches continue to function well beyond any predictions). But like Achilles and his heel, a great strength that is facing in the wrong direction uncovers a fatal weakness. The long-term relationships inherent in small town/small church can result in an increasingly self-serving, inward focus if not specifically and deliberately countered.

Therefore, resources need not only to be managed well for stewardship, but also aligned for direction. The church’s task is one of missional proclamation, i.e., “getting the Word out.” We proclaim the Gospel that was first proclaimed to us. Facilities, money, and people should be deliberately aligned with an outward trajectory.

What does this mean? Remember: small town/small church is based on relationships! So for you, “getting the Word out” does not mean that you start hosting huge attractional events. And it doesn't mean hat you simply make sure that X percentage of your church budget is allocated for missions. No, both of those are overly simplistic, perhaps even superficial, indicators that your church has aligned its resources outwardly. I’m suggesting something that is much deeper. Something that becomes ingrained into the church’s understanding of why God has placed it where it is: to be salt and light in their community.

So, yes, keep the building in good repair. Pay the light bill so that Sunday worship can continue. Fix the AC. Start a new class. But for every seemingly mundane, routine task, start to ask the question “Why?” And help people to train their minds and mouths to answer, “So that the World may know what we know.”

Can you learn to phrase every expenditure or ministry in terms of missional proclamation?

Can you help your people to start formulating their suggestions in the same way?

Up-front relational costs: Managing resources in a small town, part 2

2010-06-29T13:04:00.000-04:00

Relationships are as expensive as they are hard to measure in terms of financial worth. There is no economic scale that can make relationships quantifiable. You can’t predict how much time or effort or money a potential relationship might cost. And yet the small town small church resources are inherently bound up in relationship.

What does this mean for the small town small church? It simply means that there is no such thing as wasting God’s resources. I had a conversation with some brother pastors once where we discussed how each of our churches might approach adding another worship service. And these men—good men, Godly men, all of them—each suggested that a certain number of attendees would be prerequisite to having that service. If X number of people would not be in attendance, then it wouldn’t be worth the pastor’s time, the planning effort, the money spent on heating/cooling the building. It would be a waste of God’s resources.

That is “economy of scale” thinking, and for many churches in many cities it would be a good decision born from wise stewardship. But the “economy of scale” ministry model does not work in a small town, because everything is about relationships, and relationships are expensive. Relationships are expensive to initiate, the cost must be paid up front, and there is no guarantee of a return. Yet in a small town that is precisely the cost of ministry.

I’ve been asked to perform a number of non-member funerals over the years. Funerals are hard to do well, especially for someone you don’t know. The relational investment in a non-member funeral for myself as a pastor is staggering and immediate. The cost to my congregation is specific and measurable. And yet both my congregation and I are willing to pay the cost. My congregation lives for a few hours or days without the services of the pastor for whom they pay a salary and I spend relational time with the family in order to bring them God’s comfort. To be the visible, tangible Body of Christ. To reach out with the Gospel.

And the really amazing thing to me is that my congregation does not even seem to recognize how very odd it is to pay their pastor to be unavailable to them for a period of time. I don’t know that it’s ever occurred to them to do anything else; to suggest that I limit my pastoral services to only those places where a return on the investment is sure to produce church growth. I don’t think that they’ve ever considered that such a thing wouldn’t be worth our time. I can guarantee that no one has ever suggested such ministry is a waste of God-given resources. Why? Because that’s just the way we do things here. It’s the way we relate to one another in a small town. We care for one another. We invest into one another. We shoulder one another’s burdens without a thought or care of whether that investment pays dividends or not.

In a small town small church, there will always be many things that seem inefficient. That look like money being frittered away without a investment payoff. That look, honestly, like a waste of God’s resources. But not to us. To us it looks proper and right. It looks like people come first, money comes second, and the only good use for the latter is to help the former. That’s how small towns work. Relationships. Expensive investments that don’t always pay the dividends that money managers would like to see.

Managing God's resources for ministry in a small town

2010-06-21T12:31:00.000-04:00

As a small-town pastor, I love the people in my community. I want nothing more—nor less!—than for them to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to believe upon it, and to be transformed by it. Every single one of them. But being a small church in a small town means that we have limited resources to accomplish that goal. What to do? How can we manage God’s resources for the greatest possible effectiveness and make a God-sized impact on our community?

The first lie in managing resources for the small town small church is that bigger equals better, that more people reached through less money spent is automatically the best use of our resources. We have limited money, so we have to make the biggest splash that we can with that money. Big events. Big worship. Big advertising campaigns. In other words, do it like the big-city churches do.

In industry that’s called “economy of scale,” and it simply means that making 1 billion widgets at a time means that each individual widget is cheaper to make than if you had a production run of only 100. And of course in industry that makes sense: design costs, worker wages, production time, advertisement . . . those are all quantifiable, unchangeable production costs that mean you can make more in a single run, you can make the most widgets for the cheapest price possible. Economy of scale wins.

Except your small town isn’t an industry, and the people that live there aren’t widgets. Your small town isn’t governed by production values and customer quotas, and so the rules of “economy of scale” simply get in the way of your efforts to try and reach out to them.

Your small town is a network of relationships. In your small town relationships are king. If that weren’t true people wouldn’t stay. But instead you have in your small town 2, 3, 4 generations of a families that have lived there all their lives. Because of relationships. Not because of slick advertising slogans. Not because of production values. Not even because of amazing opportunities. Relationships.

How would you change your approach to ministry if both you and your small town, small church could understand and articulate that truth?

Growth by taking away

2010-06-15T14:35:00.000-04:00

There’s something hidden at work when we come to church. Something underneath the surface. As we speak the words of the liturgy back and forth to one another, something else is going on. As we hear the Scriptures read, there is an underlying reality. As pastor preaches, someone else is speaking. As the Sacrament is received, we get something more than wine and bread.

The hidden “thing” at work of course isn’t a thing at all, but rather a He. God hides Himself away even in our worship, working silently but surely through His Word as it is spoken and heard. Working according to His promise through His Sacrament. We sometimes think that we have come to church to praise God and to add to His glory. The reality is that through worship He adds to us.

The thing that intrigues me, then, is when well-intentioned people suggest that perhaps we could grow as a church if we were to just take something away. Cut down on the sermon time. Don’t serve communion every week. Take away some of the more difficult portions of God’s Word, the more difficult doctrines, and we’d grow.

Hmmm . . . they might be on to something. So let’s try an experiment. We’ll take two plants. Both are planted in a pot full of rich, fertile soil. Both will receive the proper amount of water for plant health, and at identical intervals. One we’ll put in a nice, sunny spot . . . and the other lock in a dark corner of the basement.

No . . . no. You're right. It doesn't work that way, does it? Growth comes not for people nor plants by robbing them of the Light. Rather than hiding away the light and robbing people of its growing powers, we uphold the things that give us His light, boldly and cheerfully and without hesitation encouraging others to see Christ’s light in action and to praise God for when it shines.

A good friend of mine puts it this way, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”

In worship, Christ gives His light through many different words and actions, and through each of those actions His light gives holy illumination to everyone in His house, both neighbor and family member alike. Don’t be fooled by the lie that by dimming His light we will grow. Rather let’s give His growth-giving light of forgiveness and life every opportunity to shine forth. For ourselves and for others.

The race that is never run in vain

2010-06-08T12:45:00.002-04:00

I’m preaching on Galatians for the next few weeks, and so in my regular devotional reading I’m in the book, too. Some might think that practice is combining work with my personal spiritual growth and excuse it because, after all, a pastor’s life can be difficult. But I find that as I mine for gold in God’s Word, He tends to give me both nuggets for myself and for the congregation, as well.

But today—this morning—it was for neither. It was for a friend of mine.

Paul drops a big pastoral bomb in chapter two. One you never hear a pastor say in front of his congregation (and, truth be told, you rarely hear it even just among pastors), but it is one that every pastor worries over. Paul confesses a fear that he had been running his race in vain. He says that there was a moment, a season, a time when everything he knew and did in ministry was called into question. That perhaps all the hard work, all the preaching, all the discipling, had been for nothing. That maybe the cost had been too great and the dividends too little.

And this is Paul speaking. Paul, who writes half of the New Testament. Paul, who traveled thousands of miles on foot to expand God’s Kingdom. Paul, who had been beaten and stoned and left for dead because he dared preach the name of Jesus Christ. Paul, who after those things stood back up and looked up to Heaven and headed back down the same missionary road he had long traveled because he could not help but preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Paul . . . who wonders, “Was it all worth it?”

And the thing is, he never really seems to answer that question. He could point to souls saved. He could point to churches planted. He could point to Spirit-inspired letters of encouragement and exhortation written and circulated from Christian to Christian. But he doesn’t count numbers. He doesn’t even seem to count the cost.

But he does say, “God was at work in my ministry.”

For just a moment, the fog of worry cleared from Paul’s head and he saw the brilliant light of Christ shining down on him. And suddenly the important question was no longer, “Was it worth it?”, but the important question was, “Was God working His ends through me?”

And the answer was—and is!—“YES!” Yes, God was at work through him then. God was at work through him now. God was leading, God was preaching, God was healing, God was saving and rescuing and delivering. God in Paul. In Paul’s ministry. In Paul’s life.

Is ministry worth it? I don’t think that’s the right question to ask anymore. I’m sorry to say that the answer to that question changes with my mood. But was God there? That I know for sure. Wherever He has been in the past, He was at work.

And where He is today, let me be there also.

“My dear Lord Jesus,

Thou art mine; therefore, I wish to be Thine.

All that I possess,

my body and my soul,

my strength and my gifts,

and all that I do,

my entire life,

shall be consecrated to Thee,

. . . to Thee alone.

Lay on me any burden Thou pleasest,

I shall gladly bear it.

Lead me anywhere,

through sorrow or joy,

through good fortune or misfortune,

through shame or honor,

through favor of men or their disfavor,

grant me a long life, or should I die an early death,

--I shall be satisfied with anything.

Lead the way, and I shall follow.”

-C.F.W. Walther, Law and Gospel

Being true in leadership

2010-06-02T12:08:00.000-04:00

For every pastor and church leader, there are three simple rules for being the best leader you can be:

1) Be true to God and His Word
2) Be true to your people.
3) Be true to yourself.

The first two are simple and straightforward. Study the Word to show yourself a workman approved. Love God and love others. I suggest that if pastors and church leaders would do those two things and do them well, 90% of church problems and issues would resolve themselves without much effort.

It's the third one, though, that seems hardest. God has made you to be you. With your talents, your strengths, your gifts. He has made you to be as you are, and not as someone else wants you to be. When you operate from within your God-given strengths, you are working from within the framework God has established for your life. When you try to please others by attempting to become something you are not, you are working against the very person God has created you to be.

The solution? Stop trying to please others and start loving them.

When all the world’s a stage, only actors play a part

2010-06-01T13:01:00.001-04:00

Sunday was one of those days when I felt bad that God really had to carry the ball in worship. I wanted things to be better, to run more smoothly. I wanted the sermon to communicate more effectively. I wanted more impact from that day. But there’s a simple fact of life that happens in worship, and that is this: You can’t manufacture the presence of the Holy Spirit, no matter how sincerely you try.

So it happened that I received a compliment after church that has haunted me for a few days now. One gentleman—a visitor—thanked me, said he appreciated the worship service, and said, “You’re very sincere.”

“Sincere.” That’s the word that stuck itself inside my mind. It’s an attitude that I’ve chosen to deliberately convey every week: “I really believe this Jesus stuff and want you to believe it, too.” It’s an attitude that reveals itself in the honest unveiling of my own weaknesses and struggles as I walk with Christ and my utter dependence upon Him and His cross. It’s shown in a choice to worship with the congregation, not to just lead them through it. The open acknowledgment that the words God speaks are intended not only for them, but for me too. So yes, I was quite pleased to hear from a visitor that he sensed my sincerity because, after all, the only reason I do the work of a messenger is because I sincerely believe in the message.

But here’s the thing. You can’t manufacture the presence of the Holy Spirit in worship, and you can’t manufacture genuine sincerity. Genuine sincerity is born from deeply held convictions—what we Christians call “faith”—that are in turn born from the testing of fire. Hardship nurtures sincerity when it is honestly endured. Sincerity is nurtured through the periods of doubt and questioning that dig deep and find bedrock. The courage of conviction cannot be held by a man who has never had his world turned upside-down, who has never had to sustain faith in the absence of evidence, who has never endured the long, dark night of the soul.

I have endured the torturous nights of my own soul and found time and time again that God’s promises are trustworthy. That His presence is continual. That His strength is incredible. And that though His ways are inscrutable, His wisdom is unimpeachable.

God has taught me that though the night seems dark, His ways always lead to light.

And so I trust, and trust sincerely. Because God is trustworthy.

What is the difference between a dying church and a living one?

2010-05-25T16:14:00.000-04:00

In years past, I have often assumed (rather smugly, I’m afraid) that the category of “dying churches” was fairly uniform. My mind’s eye pictured a dying church as having a somewhat aging building with somewhat aging members, but the real factor that put it firmly in the “dying church” category was a mental image of members rigidly refusing to acknowledge the changing community around them and a pastor lazily contented with merely holding the congregation’s hand as it slowly passed away.

Such an image was a stereotype. A personal bias born from pride. As such, I admit that I was wrong to assume that all dying churches could be roughly thrust into a single pigeon-hole.

I still assume that there must be a dying church like that out there somewhere, but I’ve never seen it myself (funny how stereotypes never seem to exist in reality, isn’t it?). But I have seen a number of other kinds of dying churches, and like each human death, each of them carries a unique kind of grief. I’ve seen still-born churches that for some passed away almost without notice but for whom the agony of unrealized hopes tore the spirit and soul from others. I’ve seen churches like the oldest resident in a nursing home, quietly resigned that the friendships of youth have faded away one by one but not having had the grace of one’s own eternal rest yet given.

I’ve seen churches with undiagnosed and unrecognized diseases; hale and hearty on the outside but inside having a congenital defect, a ticking clock that moves inexorably forward to the day it will simply stop. And I’ve seen churches with a virulent cancer that unceasingly consumes everything that is healthy within itself, a hunger that is never filled, a thirst that is never sated.

I’ve seen churches with mortal wounds gasping their final breaths even as dedicated medics worked to save them. And I’ve seen churches whose wounds, though once severe, have long since healed but the memory of pain and the visible scars have left them with a nervous fear.

Friends, I have stared death in the face more times than I ever care to remember. Sometimes from a polite distance, other times at such close proximity that the church’s death threatened to envelop me with it. I have seen Satan opening his cruel maw as he eagerly expected a fresh meal to devour, and I have seen even God’s own people shake with fear.

But Satan forgets one thing: I. Am. Yet. Alive. God’s people yet draw breath and walk upon this earth. And the God in whom we live and move and have our being dwells within us, His unending life propelling us towards an eternal future. In the relentless and fever-pitched battle for the souls of our community, only one army has the guarantee of victory! Neither side shall emerge unscathed, but only one shall lift their swords in shouts of triumph!

What is the difference between a dying church and a living one? The church that holds God’s Word and speaks it, the church that possesses God’s gifts and stewards them, the church that holds fast to the cross with one hand and shakes the other in open defiance of the Devourer’s impotent rage, this is the church that lives. She may have scars, she may have wounds, but as long as she yet draws breath and walks upon this earth, she lives in Christ and Christ in her.

Christ is alive. God's people are alive. I am alive. His church yet lives.

Why do we have church?

2010-05-22T15:33:00.000-04:00

Why do we have church?

While there are many ways to answer that question, I believe that one of the more important answers is this: There is no better tool that we can use to tear down our own self-centeredness than the church.

Think about it: Wherever the world says “Take!”, the church says, “Give.” Wherever the world says, “Demand more!”, the church says, “Provide for others.” Wherever the world says, “You deserve to be treated better!”, the church says, “Humble yourself and serve ‘the least of these.’”

Wherever the world says, “Look at me!”, the church says, “Look to Christ.”

See, Jesus Christ is the end of our self-centeredness. To see Him is to see a model of selfless living. To live with Him is to daily die to ourselves. Heeding his call, we do battle with the raging monster of “ME!”, striving against it, bending it to His will, subduing it that we may better serve Christ and those whom He would have us serve. And there is no better training for this battleground than to be found regularly in the church.

This is true because, after all, the church is populated with sinners. People who have issues and fears and failures and struggles. People for whom “stressed out” can often turn into “lash out.” And though some misguided part of us insists that we should never find such people in church, in the church is precisely the place where sinners gather. And inevitably, when a fellow Christian in their sin runs roughshod over us, immediately the monster “ME!” demands that we return hurt for hurt, mistreatment for mistreatment. Because, after all, the “ME!” insists that that other Christian should know better than to hurt. Or to mistreat.

But so should we. And living in Christ, we know what to do next.

So thus cruelly mistreated, we gather our breath, steady our stance . . . and pick up our cross. Turning back the monster me, we die to ourselves and our list of wants and demands, and lovingly minister even to the one who would mistreat us, because we are in Christ and He in us. His love puts the final death-blow to our self-centeredness, and we find ourselves extending His love to others so that they too may learn to die to self.

And the place we learned this was in the church.

The art of open-handed planning

2010-04-07T15:32:00.000-04:00

I’m sitting here at my desk and going over a document entitled Our Saviour’s long-range strategic plan. It is a rather lofty document carefully crafted to ensure solid numerical and spiritual growth here in our small church.
And it was never fully implemented.

That’s supposed to bug me. A lot. And just a few years ago, I think it would have. After all, I myself spent dozens upon dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of hours researching and preparing this plan. It is based upon observation of the character and needs of the community. It takes into account the present state of our church and what we are presently able to accomplish. It has specific, simple, measurable goals and targets that are broken down into smaller simple, measurable goals and targets. The goals have timeframes attached to them. The big picture of the plan reaches out into the community as well as shores up the spiritual maturity of our present members. I tell you without hesitation and with pardonable pride that this is a textbook example of a solid church plan.

But it never got to the point of being fully implemented.

You know the reasons why it didn’t: Life happened. “Man plans, God laughs.” That sort of thing. Things got messy and unpredictable. Unemployment in the area skyrocketed from pretty bad to just plain horrific. The housing market collapsed and foreclosures set in. Local industry was paralyzed both by scandal as well as Detroit’s inability to sell enough vehicles. Add to that a church financial panic as well as a dash of church conflict, and the grand master capital-P Plan is tossed like a coin into a drawer of well-wishing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I thought that the plan had been tossed. But it hadn’t been. Not really. Because the plan was still there. And as I go over it, I realize we learned something about church planning we hadn’t known before.

On the plan there were new ministries to be started. A few were birthed, a few have matured and are now running on their own, and a few died before they ever saw the light of day. But here’s what interested me the most: in the place of those planned but now-dead ministries a few other ministries were conceived. God-ordained circumstances in both our community and our church prevented us from doing a few specific things that we had planned on being extremely important, and in the end led us into doing other things that are now bearing fruit for His Kingdom.

What happened when we set aside the master plan last year was amazing: Along the way we unintentionally learned the art of open-handed planning. We had prayed over the plan, we had crafted the plan, we had presented the plan and we had agreed to work the plan. And then God changed the plan.

If we would have stubbornly held on to the grand, master capital-P Plan and insisted God follow our lead, this church would have tanked. And yes, I’m serious about that. I believe it’s entirely possible that we would have closed our doors if we had insisted upon following our plan and demanded God follow our lead.

But instead of clinging to our plan, we clung to another more precious piece of paper: God’s Word. And there we found that in the midst of a veritable manure-storm called life God still has His plan. For us. For our community. Rather than fight God, we learned (again, unintentionally!) to sway with His wind, to go with His tide, to live by His seasons. In other words, we learned to hold everything—even our plan!!—with an open hand so that God could take away what He desired to take away, but so that He might also give what He desired to give. And the curious thing was that, in the end, we found that He still gave us some of the desires of our hearts, but according to His will and timetable, not ours.

Open-handed planning is a bear, I’m not going to kid you about that. All of the up-front effort of research and prayer and the hard, hard work of crafting and tweaking and re-tweaking a plan to be just so must still be done because, after all, there are no shortcuts to arriving at a good plan. But when you plan with an open hand, you reserve the right for God to be God alone, for Him to act with or without your advice, without your input, without your plan. When He acts, you must be prepared to set or even cast aside entire portions of your precious plan in order to follow His lead.

What does this ultimately mean? When a church practices open-handed planning, God will get the credit for what happens in His church. The church acknowledges that they thought they had a good plan, but God one-upped them with a better one. And the church takes their proper position as God’s servants.

Good, open-handed planning is an artful joining of solid strategic planning and a confident faith in the God who holds not only today in His hands but tomorrow, as well. To me, that sounds like the perfect approach for a church.

The Curious Thing About Doing Invisible Work, continued . . .

2010-03-30T11:00:00.003-04:00

That “project accomplished!” feeling . . . that is indeed a good feeling.
But that’s a bit different—no, considerably different—from regular pastor work. Pastoring boils down to one task: the care of souls. And souls are delicate, fussy things to work with. Souls, being what they are and belonging to the sinners that they do, are impossible for me to fix. Working with souls is like damming a river with sponges—you get one trouble spot in a person’s life functioning better and another entire section breaks away, flooding their lives with destruction and havoc once again.

Souls are a difficult medium to work with because they are invisible. You can’t touch a soul. Can’t point to it. And when it is sick the best thing you can do is apply the proper medicine and hope it gets better. But because you can’t see it, you never really know if it worked or not.
I understand why so many pastors seem to run away from the essence of pastoral work. Instead of caring for souls, some prefer to run the church/corporation as a sort of Chief Pastoral Officer. Instead of caring for souls, others prefer to count dollars and demographics and knocked-on doors. Instead of caring for souls, still others declare that faithfulness is a specific and certain set of traditions and rituals and actions that can only be done just so. Anything to create a tangible, concrete, finished product that they can point to and say, “There, I fixed it!”
But a soul . . . well, that’s something that we pastors can’t fix. It’s not within my power to do. But I do know the One who can. And the One who does. And the One who promised to always do His own unique, special work with souls that I myself can’t see or hear or touch. And much to my admitted dismay, He is stubbornly on His own timetable. His work is as graspable as the wind. His statistics are impossible to quantify. But His results are gloriously and wonderfully His own.
So I cling. And I trust. I blindly and feverishly stack sponges against the coming flood, and as I do so I grasp hold of every promise He has made and apply His medicines of Law and Gospel, of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, of preaching and prayer, and I care for the souls He has entrusted to me in the best way I know how, all the while knowing that it is a work for which the results will always remain ultimately invisible to me.
And you know what? I’m okay with that. When I need a pat on the back I’ll glue a dining room chair back together. But when I want to grow God’s Kingdom, I’ll simply do what He has called me to do and let Him determine the hows and the whens of creating His results. Because, you see, that way He gets the glory. Just as it should be. For He is the One Who does the work I can’t even see.

The Curious thing about doing invisible work

2010-03-29T15:46:00.000-04:00

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I learned something about myself recently. Something that I already knew, but hadn’t been able to articulate. Something that relates directly to pastoring and ministry.

Stephanie asked me a few weeks ago if I’d start a certain project. It sounded interesting. It sounded like something that I could do. And it sounded like something I’d like. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her “yes”. Not right now. And I told her why: Because I won’t be able to see it completed for quite some time, and for the moment I couldn't bear to begin a project that would be ages before I could point to it and say, "I'm finished!"

See, lately I’ve been getting great enjoyment—yes, enjoyment!!—out of ticking things off the weekend honey-do list. A little furniture repair here, a bit of paint there. Small repairs to my old truck. Recaulking the tub. Hanging pictures on the wall just so. Installing baby-proof latches on bathroom cabinets.
A couple of months ago I thought I had projects to do because I enjoy working with my hands and liked the diversion from routine pastor work. But when Stephanie asked me about that new project, the real reason I do those things clicked into place like the last piece of a puzzle. I enjoy those projects because I can get them done.

There’s a great amount of simple joy in pulling out the proper tools for the job. In measuring and leveling and planning how each piece will fit into place. The reason for that joy is because I know that if everything is done just right, the end result will be a finished project that adds beauty or functionality to our home. Even the occasional mid-project course correction (when things just aren’t quite playing out according to plan) are not stressful at all, because then I get the joy of revamping the plan to suit the materials or tools or skill that I have on hand to accomplish the task I want to get done. And in the end, I can point to a specific piece of furniture and say, “There, I fixed it.” I can touch the results of my own efforts. Admire a photo hung true and square. Use a repaired appliance. And—let’s be honest—I can also bask in a little bit of appreciation from wife and family even as I pat myself on the back just a bit.

That “project accomplished!” feeling . . . that’s a good feeling.

It’s one that I absolutely crave at times. But if it’s a feeling that I compulsively crave from pastoral ministry, I run the risk of trying to make that work into something it shouldn't be. Instead of fixing, I'll create a kludge.

More on that tomorrow.

From Boys to Men, Part 2: Mentoring

2010-03-25T13:22:00.000-04:00

Our culture enables weak, selfish, irresponsible boys. Boys who don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to truly love another. Boys who don’t exhibit the barest qualities of manhood other than having the requisite plumbing.

You can’t properly call them “men”, because despite their age they’ve only matured physically, not emotionally. Not spiritually. Think about it: Little boys are self-centered. Good men sacrifice themselves for the benefit and bettering of others. Boys are content to eat off their mother’s table and have everything prepared for them. Men provide for their families. Boys shirk unpleasant tasks. Men embrace “duty” as an honorable word and concept. Boys are governed by emotions. Men by wisdom.

Everywhere you go you will see boys that should have learned to be men long, long ago. In the store, on the street, even in the church. It is a plague on our culture. It is destructive to families. Furthermore, frankly, it is disgusting. How did we get to this point?

I suppose there are a great number of factors that went into the modern-day deconstruction of genuine manhood. But rather than get bogged down into theoreticals and hypotheticals, let’s hit one very simple, important, practical reason.

Mentors.

Specifically, a lack of mentors. Boys need a man to teach them how to become men. They need to be shown. They need to see genuine manhood played out before their eyes by a man who understands and values unique manly qualities. They need to be taught to turn a wrench and run a saw. They need to learn how to flip circuit breakers and how to mow a lawn properly. But more than that, in order to be genuine men boys need to see the masculine strength of humility, the manly compassion of personal service, the Godly process of wisdom. They need Men-tors. Men who have counted the cost of manhood and embraced it. Men who love being men and want boys to become real men.

What’s a mentor? The simplest definition is a man who takes a boy under his wing and shows him the way. No fuss, no frills, no program. Just find a boy and help carry him towards manhood.

Once I was at a garage sale and witnessed a man buying an old hunting bow. When I wished him good hunting with it, he laughed and said, “Oh, no . . . I’ve got one at home that I use. This is for a boy who doesn’t have one, but wants to hunt.” That man was a mentor. I picture him teaching the boy to shoot, to walk quietly through the woods, to read the sign and to bring home his quarry. But more important than that, he’s showing a young boy what it means to be generous with both his time and his money. He’s helping a young boy become a man.

Another man I know builds large, flying, model airplanes. You know, those gas-powered, remote-controlled ones that are so fun to watch. It’s not uncommon to see a young boy in his shop, listening to him tell stories of the old days, learning what makes a small piston engine go, and seeing the craft and care an old man puts into doing the job right. He’s another mentor influencing young boys towards manhood.

I recall yet another man who routinely sat down at his old roll-top desk in the evening and open his old, worn Bible. Without making a show of it, he’d read . . . he’d pray . . . and then more often than not sing a hymn. And on a lot of days there’d be a small boy sitting across the room, playing behind a chair, but always watching him with one eye. That man was my grandfather. And his own unassuming way he showed me what it meant to live out a quiet, personal, yet unmistakably all-transforming faith in Jesus Christ.

Fellas, young boys need your mentoring if they are ever going to become men. They can’t learn it on their own, because you didn’t learn it on your own, either. It’s time—beyond time, actually—that take mentoring seriously so that boys can be drawn into manhood joyfully.

From Boys to Men, Part 1

2010-03-24T13:17:00.001-04:00

I have just about had it with little boys. No, not the ones who are genuine little boys—the ones who are 5, 6, 7 years old, they’re cute and a whole lot of fun!—but the little boys who should have outgrown their diapers decades ago.

You’ve seen them. You’ve had to deal with them. These are the little boys who in their mid-20’s are letting their girlfriends provide everything for them. These are the little boys who in their mid-30’s are making their wives take the initiative for discipline and training in their homes. The little boys who in their mid-40’s and beyond who spend every minute on the job griping about their boss and every minute off the job doing exactly what they want to do and never lifting a finger to serve another human being inside their house or out.

I got to thinking about this a few weeks ago as I observed my own boys. A few of them are teenagers and within a few years they’ll be striking out on their own. They’re not ready just yet because they’re not men just yet, but they are well on their way. They don’t know I’m watching them, so they’re not putting on a show for my benefit.

As I watch them, every month I see manly qualities becoming increasingly evident in their lives. Qualities like serving, caring, and compassion. They can work with their hands and their minds. They love like men—a bit coarse and gruff at times, but deeply and enduringly and unfailingly. They have an intuitive grasp of how to respect and submit to proper authority without being an ingratiating yes-man. And more and more all the time I see them exhibiting masculine strength that is held under the restraint of self-discipline.

I’m proud of my boys. Darn proud. They give me hope for the men of our future. I pray that in time they will stand as examples for how to be strong, Godly men in a culture that positively breeds a poisonous little boy Peter Pan syndrome.

"The best laid plans of mice and men," or, "How I resigned from a job that I never did"

2010-03-15T15:55:00.001-04:00

The best laid plans of mice and men . . .

Yeah, I know. Cliché’ me to death. “When God closes one door He opens another.” “It’s for the best.” “No sense in crying over spilt milk.” “It’s not the end of the world.” Sigh.

Unfortunately, it's the cliché’s that seem to express my feelings best when it comes to how my plans to become more active and in-the-thick-of-it in terms of serving my community did not pan out. Last month I applied for—and was appointed to—a position on our local Board of Review. On that board, I would have had an opportunity to come into direct contact with people in our community as they sought relief from property taxes. I viewed it as a good opportunity to serve people in ever broadening circles of influence. Rather like an extension of some aspects of my work as a local pastor.

However, it seems that there was a small technical, legal glitch: I live in a parsonage and therefore do not own any taxable property in the city limits myself, which in turn makes me ineligible to legally serve on the local Board of Review. So today I resigned from what is possibly the shortest and least productive Board of Review term in the history of our little city. Just a few weeks long and not even a meeting to show for it. Curse you, obscure legal jargon!

At a time when I feel an ever-increasing desire to help see our community thrive, missing out on that opportunity is a bit of an irritation. Still, from an irritating grain of sand a pearl is formed . . . or so I’ve been cliché’d. I’m confident that other opportunities will present themselves in the future, and when the time is right, those opportunities will come my way.

In the meantime, here’s to you, Hudson! May you thrive as God blesses you through the work of others!

Improve your church's prayer ministry in just 20 minutes

2010-03-11T12:49:00.000-05:00

Had a brilliant and yet simple idea today on how our prayer ministry could be improved, and wanted to share it with you so that God may be glorified and His people might pray!

Like you probably do, we have a weekly prayer list inserted into our church bulletin. It includes prayer requests for members and others that we know and love who need a touch from God in some way. It includes regular prayer requests for missionaries, for area Lutheran pastors, and for local pastors of other traditions. Finally, it also has a section devoted to praise and thanksgiving for answers to prayer.

So far, so good. Pretty routine prayer list, in all honesty. But this morning as I was typing up Sunday’s prayer list, this small, simple idea was birthed in my head. On the back of the prayer insert I added a space for individuals to write in their personal prayers for the week and another space to record God’s answers to their prayers. This small addition should help people want to keep the prayer list handy, thus allowing them to better incorporate Sunday’s prayers into their lives throughout the week and also make it one small step easier for them to develop a regular and habitual prayer life.

And then, as usually happens with good ideas that come from God, another idea piggybacked onto that one. When I thought about how good it is to recall God’s providence and answers to prayer in our past, I realized how easy it would be to put together a system to do just that. All people would have to do is take our newly modified prayer list with their prayers and God’s answers now written on the back, put it in a folder and voila! Instant prayer journal! Way to go, God!

I’m a bit busy today, but thought this was too much of a God idea to put it off. So I put together a very simple and easy system. I took some regular file folders and glued a cover sheet to the front labeling that folder as a “Our Saviour Prayer Ministry” folder. And then this Sunday I’ll give them out to our members for them to put each week’s prayer list in, and in time they will have developed a long, long list of exactly how God has worked to answer prayers in their lives. God will be glorified, His people will be strengthened, and we’ll all learn to pray even more!

Total time invested this morning in this small, but important improvement in our prayer ministry? 20 minutes, start to finish. Love it when God puts a plan together!

Why I love the tipping point

2010-03-08T12:21:00.002-05:00

The tipping point is that place right before all the action happens and time dances for just a moment. It is that place where your mind races through approximately one billion different scenarios—successes, losses, huge victories, crushing defeats—while time hangs. It is the place where no path is forbidden, no door is yet closed, and all that exists is possibility. The tipping point is after the pregnancy test has been peed on and before the results show up. The tipping point is holding a lottery ticket just before they announce the winning number. The tipping point is right after the cars crest the first climb of the roller coaster and right before you raise your arms.

It is a place that like no other is pregnant with potential. And I love that moment. I live for that moment.

I love that moment not because it is safe (it’s not). Not because I hate to commit to one path (I don’t). Not because I am afraid of making the wrong choices (I’m not). Not because I’ll be frightened by the hard work that will comes afterwards (I won’t). But I love that moment because in that one suspended heartbeat of time I see threads being woven together. Each thread is a vibrant future possibility. Each thread is tied directly to another possible outcome. Each outcome spawns new possibilities. And in that eternal microsecond of the tipping point colors, hues, and shades of potential are woven skillfully and masterfully, with blinding, blurring speed into a tapestry that reveals the human stories of what may yet come. All our joys, all our sorrows, all our triumphs, the hopes and fears of all the years, each is a thread being held and woven by a single, masterful hand. A hand who cares more about what the future may hold than even I do.

The hand weaving that tapestry is the hand of God.

I love the tipping point because there in that silence between “tick” and “tock” I see God’s benevolent guiding hand over our days to come more broadly, more deeply, than I do at any other time. I see that He truly does both see and hold the future—no matter what that future may be—and that I can entrust myself, my family, and my church to Him.

And so, as the tipping point comes to an end and my glimpse into future’s tapestry fades, I close my eyes . . . raise my arms . . . and plummet screaming with joy down the thrilling, exhilarating ride into God’s future.

God, do I love the tipping point.

Love Jesus? Or love serving Him?

2010-03-04T14:14:00.003-05:00

If you could have just one dream come true, what would it be?

Last night I preached a sermon on church. Although I didn’t get too specific, I clearly wasn’t thinking about “Church” in the big, broad sense of the word. I was thinking about us. Here. The church we call Our Saviour Lutheran. And the question that I posed was this: Have we lost our first love?

It was one of those questions that was safe to ask because I already knew the answer. I knew the answer because I know this church. I know other churches. And without fail, every single church that I’ve ever been in, attended, served at, or heard of has in some way, in some fashion, been guilty of falling in love with something other than Jesus Christ. Some churches fall in love with Robert’s Rules of order and stick to that above all costs. Others fall in love with themselves, and start to believe their own hype. Others still fall in love with service, or ministry, or evangelism. They fall in love with the idea of serving Jesus, but somehow misplace Him in the process.

Let me tell you, I love Jesus Christ. I love Him because of the dead way of life that He brought me out of. I love Him because in Him I have forgiveness, I have peace, I have strength. I love Him because of what He’s done for my wife and for my children.

But last night and then some more today, I realized that when it came to church, the dream I had for Our Saviour had a focus that was ever so slightly misplaced. The dream I wanted to come true was for us to be a church that took great joy and fulfillment in serving Christ and serving our neighbors. That’s good, and it’s worthy of a big dream . . . but not if it means that we love serving Christ more than we love Christ Himself. Live in that kind of dream too long, and eventually even a worthy dream becomes an idol.

So, I need to tweak my focus just the tiniest bit. Our Saviour needs the same thing. Like I did last night in the sermon, we need to bring back to mind all that Jesus has done for us in the past and all that He is doing now. Jesus needs to become our first love again, because He’s the one who first loved us.

Church and community overlap in a small town, Part 2

2010-02-24T11:28:00.001-05:00

As I was discussing yesterday, the evangelism efforts of a church in a large/larger city seem to be most effective to the degree that they are able to create a sense of genuine community. But the small-town church is significantly different. Why?

It’s so very different because all the things that a big-city church works so hard to create are the very things that a small town already possesses: Relationships? Most everybody went to high school together anywhere from five to fifty-five years ago. A place to be known? It’s impossible to walk down the street without someone calling out your name. Face-to-face human interactions? Every waking moment spent in public is an opportunity for personal chit-chat, to catch up with old friends. And as for caring? Why, you’ve never seen caring until you’ve seen an entire community rally around one of their own who’s fallen ill with a deadly sickness.

The hard-won sense of “community” that immediately distinguishes the church from the big city it ministers to is nearly identical in every major way to the type of community that is already—and inherently—existent in a small town. And so the small-town church unfortunately fades into the background of community life. Yes, it is generally agreed that church is a vital, appreciated part of small-town life, but the church is an undercurrent. The small-town church’s fostering of “community” does not radically stand out as being immediately and quantitatively different from the sense of community that is already found everywhere else.

And there, finally, is my dilemma. For decades upon decades, the church has been told that in order to have growth, it must be radically different from the city it is in: It must offer a genuine sense of community, of belonging, of caring. Entire outreach paradigms have been built upon this premise. An entire movement was founded upon the idea of creating small groups where community could thrive. But such church paradigms and movements do not—and I suggest can not—hope to ever rival the deep waters of community that are unique to the small town. In short: When it comes to evangelism, they do not work.

It’s time for the small-town church to have a new paradigm for evangelism. It’s time for the small-town church to understand the supporting role it plays in the community’s sense of wholeness. But at the same time, it is time for the small-town church to understand that it—and it alone!—has something to offer that the community itself never could. The small-town church offers, simply, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I don’t know of anything else that can make a small-town church stand out, to mark it as significantly different from the city it ministers to.

Church and community overlap in a small town

2010-02-23T15:48:00.001-05:00

In my transition from big-city, larger-church work to small-town ministry, I’ve made most of my discoveries and insights simply by blindly stumbling over them. But there’s one observation that I’ve noticed for quite some time and nevertheless still fail to grasp a deep understanding of its importance. I’m talking about the overlap between church and community in a small town.

In a larger city the church typically operates with an “us and them” mentality. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but in a positive sense. The church is a group of people, bound together by faith and by a passion for mission, that looks upon their community and asks, “How can we reach them?”

This “us and them” thinking is pretty natural, as most of the faces in the large city are, well . . . faceless. Live in a large city and you see tiny glimpses of many, many people’s lives. The vast majority of the people are people you’ve never met. Go to a restaurant and you do so in relative privacy. See a movie and you do so in obscurity. Go to a park, a mall, a concert, a whatever, and by and large the chances are that you will be one of a faceless mass with precious little deep-level interaction with the throngs of human beings around you.

So the church in a larger city seeks ways and events by which it can create face-to-face human interaction. It seeks ways to create community. By necessity, the church in the larger city is forced to craft the type of authentic, Biblical community where a group of people care radically and deeply about one another. Where people can know one another. Where people can interact on a human—and not just transactional—level. And to the degree that it has success in doing so, it stands apart as a brightly lit beacon of goodwill and hope and having a place to belong.

That’s the big city, though (Which, for my purposes, is anything above a population of 5,000 or so.). The small town . . . that’s significantly different. So different, in fact, that it’s taken me an entirely new blog post to understand it. Look for that post tomorrow.

Book review: The Liturgical Year, by Joan Chittister

2010-02-08T13:10:00.002-05:00

Review of The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life
By Joan Chittister

As a Lutheran pastor, I was intrigued by the opportunity to read and review Joan Chittister’s book, “The Liturgical Year”. In this book, Chittister shows how the faith community is bound together through the constantly repeating cycle of the church’s liturgical calendar. And as a Lutheran pastor, I was curiously both pleased and disappointed with this book.

What Chittister does quite well in “The Liturgical Year” is condenses centuries of complex developments in the liturgical calendar into an easy to read overview. With just a few deft strokes, the historical development of say, the Christmas season, is outlined for her reader’s understanding, and yet her underlying assertion that the church year is a spiritual journey taken for our benefit consistently comes to the fore.

Chittister’s book also does an admirable job of highlighting an essential tension in the liturgical calendar; that being the question “Do we do the liturgy or does the liturgy do its work upon us?” The book strikes hard at the personal transformation that the liturgical year eventually commands. Here Chittister’s insights are keen and penetrating, her application to living the Christian life challenging.

Ultimately, though, the book reveals a fatal flaw. Chittister consistently admonishes the Christian to make “contemplation” his/her focal point. This subtly but surely drives the reader towards the notion that Jesus Christ is properly entitled “Savior” only in that He is an exemplary model to follow. There is precious little talk about the true Gospel of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins. Rather than encouraging Christians to gaze upon the alien work of the cross, Chittister ultimately directs them back to their own navels.

Overall, I appreciated what the book had to offer historically. But when it comes to the book’s assertion of what stuff the Christian life is truly made of, I believe there is far, far too much “we” and not nearly enough “He.”

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com http://BookSneeze.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

What’s the vehicle that gets us from point C to point D?

2010-02-02T16:01:00.001-05:00

See that above? That’s my old Dodge pickup. Bought it off a friend when he moved out of state. She’s not too pretty to look at, I know. Tires are balding, paint is chipping, the rear bumper is more rust than it is metal, but she does what I need her to do. If I’m going hunting, she gets me from my front door to the land where I chase deer. If I’m hauling a bit of firewood, she’ll go from the trees to my backyard woodpile with as much wood as she can carry. If I need to drag some brush or yard waste downtown to our local drop-off point, she’s there like a champ. Yup, my old truck does a decent enough job of getting me from point A to point B. Not in style, necessarily . . . but point A to point B nevertheless, and that’s what matters to me. So I love my old truck.

It gets me to thinking . . . what’s the vehicle that takes Our Saviour Lutheran not from point A to point B, but from point C to point D? Like many smaller churches in rural areas, we’re finding out that point C (which stands for “churched culture”) just doesn’t automatically work in the way it used to. People in the community don’t just automatically come to church like they might have in decades past. Secular activities and events that used to religiously avoid Wednesday evenings—so that kids and parents could attend a mid-week church service—are now creeping into the calendar even on Sunday mornings. When people in our community need answers or direction in life, “church” is simply not the first solution that pops into their minds. Point C—the “churched culture” era where church was a constant staple in the heartbeat of small-town life—is rapidly passing away over the horizon. We need to get to point D.

Point D (the “D” stands for “disciples of Christ”) is the point we need to go. It’s the point where we gather together weekly for refreshing, strengthening, healing, and equipping so that we can head into our community throughout the rest of the week and be a visible mask of the invisible God to the people we know and love and work with and live with week in and week out. Where we love our neighbors first and then invite them to experience Christ’s love with us. Where we carry God’s precious Word in our hearts, keeping it at the ready for the eventual—but inevitable—time when our neighbors finally ask us, “Why are you always so kind to us?” Where week in and week out our lives are genuinely transformed by Christ’s redeeming love, and so it is the most natural thing in the world that we would desire that the people we know and love and work with and live with would come to know His love, too.

What’s the vehicle that gets us from point C to point D? Does it have to be shiny and new? Trendy and hip? Cutting-edge and attention-grabbing?

Or could that vehicle be something plain and ordinary? Something that looks a bit unattractive on the surface, maybe a bit worn around the edges . . . and yet something that when used, becomes much appreciated and well-loved? Could the vehicle that takes us from a declining “churched culture” to a thriving “disciples of Christ” be something as simple, as plain, as ordinary as God’s Word?

If that Word is learned and loved, if we load our burdens into that Word and let it carry them, if we use that Word to pursue a different kind of large game, if we talk about it and write it down and wear it upon our hearts and live it out in our lives and talk about it with our children as we come and go down the road . . . then yes. Yes, I believe it can. And yes . . . I believe it will.

Lord, let us love Your Word, and use it to make us disciples of Your Son.

Busting chops and being a man

2010-01-30T15:31:00.001-05:00

I am honored—absolutely honored—to have a select group of Godly men in my life that are in no way afraid to bust my chops when I get out of line. One group is a group of men that I only know virtually through an online forum. The other group is a group in my local church. Still others are valued friends that I know from other venues. These are men that have stuck by my side through thick and thin, through fire and flame. They have comforted me when I needed it, encouraged me when I needed it, and absolutely thrown me to the mat when I needed it. They have continually exhibited courage by being unafraid to speak a word of rebuke to me at those times when I have rightly warranted it. These are men whom I have relied upon for guidance, for strength, and for Godly friendship.

We are told in Scriptures that iron sharpens iron. I know from personal experience that iron is only sharpened with friction, with heat, with pressure, and by the shearing away of all that is dull until a sharp, battle-ready edge is honed. I've often thought that--for the iron--this cannot be considered a comfortable experience.

This is the job of Godly men: To be a friend that does not fear truth, whether spoken or received. To foster a friendship that endures discomfort. To craft a relationship that knows the Biblical reality that steadfastly standing by another in battle in no way mitigates the responsibility of using the double-edged sword of the Word to pierce a fellow warrior’s self-reliant and sinfully self-centered armor. Godly men know that the phrase “I’ve got your back” means that we know we can trust one another for protection from the flaming arrows of the enemy as well as we know the full meaning of the words “wounds from a friend can be trusted.”

In other words, the job of Godly men is to forge friendships that center upon the cross, where our sin and salvation meet. And God—in His Divine grace and wisdom—has given me friends such as these.

Together, we stand. Together, we fight. Together, we confess our failings and receive absolution for our sins. And as we do, the Kingdom of Heaven advances in our own lives as it does in our communities.

Today—as always—I thank God for these, my friends.

On Trying, Risking, and Failing

2010-01-27T15:03:00.000-05:00

In a small town and a small church, there is always the very real danger of making “comfort” an idol of sorts. Nice traditions become unchangeable rituals. Weird congregational quirks get set in stone. “We’ve always done it this way” becomes a refrain meaning, “We don’t know why we do it this way, but we don’t dare change it now!” We know that what we used to do used to work, and because of our small size and limited resources, relying on the past seems to be the most comfortable way to head into the future.

Old habits die hard; I understand that. Not everybody is wired to be a risk-taker; I understand that. There is great value in tradition, ritual, and even comfort; I even understand that.

But the danger of comfort’s siren song is that when we expend all of our energy in pursuing the comfort of the familiar, then the church’s mission finds itself dashed upon the rocks. The purpose of the church is set aside. The church’s destination is obscured. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” becomes “We have built it, let them come.”

Repeating the patterns of the past may create a neat, orderly, and comfortable feeling, but I’d rather take the road that leads me to the messy but impassioned labor of storming the gates of Hell.

I believe that—missionally speaking—that a small church especially must learn to become comfortable in being uncomfortable. It must learn to take comfort in the cross while constantly pushing forward into the enemy’s strongholds in the community. It must stand upon solid doctrine while constantly challenging itself towards new and unfamiliar missional ground. It must embrace trying and risking and reaching while also refusing to be paralyzed by the fear of stumbling and failing.

The church’s heart beats faster when it loves the question, “What if . . .?”

The church’s life is lived more fully when it loves the answer, “Why not?”

Conflict is unavoidable, not undesirable

2010-01-25T17:59:00.001-05:00

I’m not a guy who particularly enjoys conflict. It’s rare that I feel compelled to get up in somebody’s face. I hate those awkward moments where I struggle to find just the right words to say to delicately approach a touchy subject. I would much rather that people just got along.

And there’s the rub: people don’t just get along. Everyone has their own personal history, their own personality, their own likes and dislikes. What seems common to me seems strange to you, what is “normal” to you is “different” to somebody else. And those differences ensure that sooner rather than later people will come into conflict with somebody else. Now, add the fact of everyone also having their own struggles with sin, and we’ve got a grand recipe for conflict to brew. Conflict is unavoidable.

But that doesn’t mean that conflict is automatically undesirable. Look at what I just said: conflict is often generated by personal differences. That means, for starters, that conflict is an opportunity to get to know someone on a deeper level than you did before. You can find out their passions, what affects them strongly, what moves them like nothing else does. Conflict provides an opportunity for intimate knowledge of another human being.

Deeper than that, though, is this strange truth: Conflict—when exacerbated by sin—provides an opportunity for Christian intimacy and fellowship like nothing else can, because it provides an opportunity for you to actually forgive a brother or sister in Christ for their sin and humbly receive their forgiveness for yours, as well. And in that, what was formerly a lamentable division in the Body of Christ becomes an amazing testimony to Christ’s ability to not only reconcile us to God, but to one another. Conflict, when healed, results in the Body experiencing greater Christian fellowship than it had before.

The conflict that I considered undesirable has now become indispensable.

Think of that the next time you butt heads with someone at church.

That darn shrinking budget!

2010-01-11T11:21:00.001-05:00

I have mixed emotions over what went on here at Our Saviour on Sunday. No, not at the worship service; that was pretty good, actually. But what’s got me feeling at odds with myself is what happened during the rest of the day. Let me explain:

New year means new budget. Every year since I was called to pastor here, we’ve seen the church budget shrink just a little more every year. I understand the causes, but that doesn’t make it any easier to learn how to try and do more with less. And still each year our budget has grown smaller.

But what’s more, each year our budget hasn’t been balanced. You heard me: for five straight years we’ve passed a budget that, when we’ve done the math and estimated how much money we could expect to receive in the coming year, we acknowledge ahead of time we won’t be able to meet.

This is the part of the story that bothers me. It worries me. An unbalanced budget doesn’t seem like a good business practice. A shrinking budget raises red flags for continuing future ministry. I wonder if I’ve led the congregation wrong, somehow. And I wonder just how long this church can continue on.

I don’t want this church to close down. Not on my watch. Not ever. Because people that I love are here inside the church. Not only that, but there are people I love out in the community who haven’t yet joined our family. Both groups need Jesus, both groups need His forgiveness, His providence . . . His life. And both groups are people that God Himself has placed me in relationship with, people of whom He has said, “Pastor, you just offer them what I have to give, and I’ll make sure that I give them what you have to offer.” And never once has God let me—or them—down. He’s always been faithful to His promises.

When I look at church finances and an ever-shrinking pile of money, I doubt. I fret. I worry. But when I look at the people I see their need for Christ, I remember His promises, and I simply believe and act.

Now you tell me which of those has a future.

Courage does not come in comfort

2010-01-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

Being comfortable does not require courage. When a church remains in a state of spiritual stasis, it does not need courage. Doing what we’ve always done, maintaining the status quo, and perpetuating a weekly cycle of go to worship/give an offering/go back home does not demand courage. Living the way you’ve always lived is a comfortable existence (if somewhat bland), but it is not a courageous one.

In Biblical terms, living in Ur is not an act of courage.

When God called Abram, He offered him the chance to not only be immensely blessed, but also to be an immense blessing to others. He offered Abram the chance to literally be a world-changer. “You will be great” and “You will be a blessing” were two sides of God’s one coin that He held out to Abram. It was an amazing, heart-pounding moment filled with enormous opportunity. But there was one catch:

Abram had to have courage.

Abram had to get up, he had to leave, he had to go away from what he knew and the people he loved and set out on a journey. A journey for which God had chosen a destination that He hadn’t even felt necessary to share with Abram at this time. God demanded one thing of Abram: faith in what God was promising was good and worthy and deserving of courage.

Courage doesn’t come in comfort. It only comes in crisis. Courage comes when a church finally grasps that it is dying a slow death and that it must make some changes in order to continue with God’s mission. Courage comes when you call in end-of-life hospice care for your husband and you realize that very soon you will be alone. Courage comes when the phone rings and the doctor says, “Your test results are back. We need to speak face to face.” Courage comes when life is shaken up, when the status quo is thrown out the door, when you are forced to come face to face with the realities that life means change, that change means discomfort, that discomfort means crisis, and that somehow God still has a destination in mind for you at the end of it all. Courage only comes when are forced to say, “Yes, Lord . . . I do believe that what you promise is good and worthy and deserving of courage. Speak, Lord, and I will follow, no matter what the cost.”

In other words, courage comes when you follow God and leave the comfort of your own personal Ur.

Book review—Primal: A Quest for the Lost Soul of Christianity

2009-12-22T15:03:00.001-05:00

Since the time I was a young boy, stories and tales of adventure and heroic commitment to a greater cause have stirred something deep within me. Those stories—whether heard in a tale, read in books, or seen on a screen—touched something in me, something deep and elemental and not entirely explicable. And those tales would cause a transformation in my inner being. For a time I would carry myself more erect, I would look at the world with a keener eye, I would observe with clearer vision. The elemental forces stirred my heart to beat faster and my life to live louder.

Primal is such a book.

It’s not that Primal is a theological masterpiece or the concepts that Mark Batterson proposes are supreme examples of finely honed propositional truths. It’s not that Mark exegetes the Scriptures with grander precision than scholars of Hebrew or Greek. It’s not even that he has captured something new and different truth of Christianity to speak about. In fact, if you asked me for a book that exemplified any of those things, I would not recommend Primal to you.

But if you desire a book that touches off an elemental stirring within your soul, a book that breaks you and challenges presuppositions and brings you to repentance over a passionate zeal for God you once had but now have lost, a book that stirs up your heart with God-sized passions, a book that reinvigorates your vision for doing God’s mission in the place where He has placed you . . . then Primal is a book you want to read.

You want to read it because Mark Batterson does a splendid job bringing to paper the grand, visionary scope of the words Amo Dei . . . “Love God.” Loving God with all your heart, and your soul, and your mind, and your strength. Those concepts are so large that sometimes I have forgotten how elemental they truly are, and how world-transforming they can truly be. That’s where Primal shines. It rekindles those loves, awakening them from a cold, ashen slumber and fanning them back into living flame. Primal stirred me in just such a way.

You can purchase Primal for yourself at Amazon.com

10 ways to stretch your gift-giving dollar this Christmas

2009-12-15T14:28:00.003-05:00

Do you want to save money this year, and still make Christmas meaningful?

As I've studied and thought about worshipping fully, spending less, giving more, and loving all (inspired by http://www.adventconspiracy.org/), I came up with 10 easy ideas to stretch your gift-giving dollar this Christmas. If you're not done shopping yet, may I suggest the following?

Cut costs by making gifts or regifting:
1) Give freshly baked goods as a gift. Give warm, fresh bread. Give Christmas cookies.
2) Give a homemade blanket or quilt
3) Give your friend an item you own that they admire.
4) Give a family member a specific item for which they have expressed a sentimental value.
5) Give a friend a cherished but broken item that you have taken and then repaired for them.

Give a gift that multiplies value:
6) Give a pair of TOMS shoes. For every pair you buy, they give a pair away. One for one.
7) Give a bottle of Cherry Creek Winery’s “The Winds ‘07 Cabernet Sauvignon”. Not just the profits, but the FULL PRICE goes to provide sponsorships for the Jackson, MI School of the Arts
8) Give a gift that helps a friend serve others: a gas gift card to a person who is always taking other people to the doctor, yarn to a person who knits mittens for children, etc.
9) Give a gift in their name to an organization that serves others such as the Hudson food pantry, Compassion International, or the LCMS World Relief water project.
10) Give a Bible

Of Tyrants and Hirelings

2009-12-14T13:59:00.002-05:00

You can’t describe the full spectrum of pastoral ministry with one single word. It’s impossible. But I think you can do it with one hyphenated word: servant-leader.

In the Scriptures and in church history there is an astounding record of men who have led the church. These are bold, passionate men who have led both the local church and the church at large with vision and a committed zeal. They were often misunderstood at the time, but history has exonerated them.

The church MUST have leaders like this! We desperately need men who are willing to speak truth even in the face of opposition. We desperately need leaders who have a passion for carrying the timeless truths of God’s Word into the future. We desperately need pastors who boldly lead their churches into a fuller realization of disciple-making.

But if history shows us good leaders, it also shows us “leaders” who were little more than self-centered narcissists intent upon using others to broaden their own fame. That’s why it’s so important to remember that while a pastor must be a leader, he also must be a servant. A pastor can’t just go his own way, but must do the bidding of God, for Whom he works. But what’s more, the pastor does God’s work for the benefit of others. The pastor is servant of both God and man.

It’s hard, at times, to find the right balance in applying servant-leadership. I’ve seen pastors lean too much upon “leader” and become petty tyrants, ruling their little empires with absolute domination. I’ve also seen pastors lean too much towards “servant” and become little more than people-pleasing hirelings. Neither is pleasing to God. Neither benefits people.

But when a pastor hits that balance, everything clicks into place! The Gospel is proclaimed. Sinners are comforted in Christ's forgiveness. Members are empowered to do ministry. The church moves forward, an unstoppable juggernaut, a barbarian horde, a disciplined army, a finely-tuned machine, a primal force. It is a loud, bold, private, humble, frantic, focused, wildly exciting free-for-all that is as unparalleled in sheer historical weight as it is in sheer weight of paradox. It is life-changing and world-transforming. It is history in the making. It is service. It is leadership.

It is one hyphenated word: servant-leader. That’s what being a pastor is all about.

Small-town pride of a different sort

2009-12-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

A little, pesky sin found me again this past week. Our small community puts on a top-notch Christmas cantata every year. Beginning at the end of October, people from churches all around the area come together on a weekly basis to practice. And because we’re all church people, the director (who does an AMAZING job, by the way!) will always ask one of the participating pastors to close us in prayer. There’s where that small, pesky sin begins to bite at me. That pesky sin is pride. Honestly, I like to be asked to stand and pray.

Ugh. There, I said it. I like to be noticed. I like to be honored.

Being in a small Midwestern town is probably one of the few places left on earth where a pastor receives some automatic honor and community status. The manager of our local grocery store greets me with “Good morning, Pastor!”, even though he’s not a member of my church. Every so often I get a phone call from a community leader, “Pastor, we’d like for you to come and do the opening for _____.” If I ever need a calling card to get me in a door, it’s “I’m the pastor down at the Lutheran church, the one by the schools.”, and I’m in. It’s bizarre. It’s like being a mini-pope. I half expect someone someday to kiss my ring.

. . . and I like it that way. Which makes me feel really, really gross.

It’s one of the few times in Scripture where I can hear Jesus speaking directly against me. In Mark 12:38-39, Jesus warns his disciples, “Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.” And I think of myself, in my Lutheran clerical garb of flowing robes, and my fleshly desire to be known and respected . . . and I weep. I weep for what that pesky sin twists and warps inside of me.

So I make choices to combat that pesky sin. I choose to be the anti-pastor. I’ll live like the common man. In my time off I’ll go around in jeans and my warm and worn flannel shirt. I’ll talk like a normal human being. I’ll be known around town by my first name. I’ll smoke my pipe in public and even unashamedly buy some good beer at the store. And ultimately, I’ll live out my faith in simple, quiet ways. I refuse to live a life of loud piety, broadcasting it with flowing robes and important-sounding titles.

Because in the end, I want to be known for Whose I am, not what I do. I want to be known for the character of Christ that causes me to love others, not my office that demands I preach to them. I want people to know that I am just a servant. That I must decrease so that the One I serve may increase.

I want Christ to be known . . . not me.

And then, just every so often, a person pays me a compliment higher than all the deferential treatment combined. Every so often, a person I’ve known for a while will say in a very complimentary way, “I didn’t know you were a pastor.” And then, more often than not, they’re ready to hear about the One I serve. Then He increases . . . and I decrease . . . and I rejoice that Christ has been made known.

Deliberate communication in a small church

2009-12-08T16:42:00.000-05:00

My philosophy of pastoring an established, smaller, rural church is simple: Honor the past, look towards the future. A church like ours has a rich heritage that spans several decades. Traditions have been established and certain notions have been set in stone. But we’ve also got a good future ahead of us as we look ahead and try to discern how we can continue to carry the Gospel out into our community in the 21st century and, God willing, beyond. That’s why I believe it is so important for a church like mine to communicate using a variety of different mediums.

For instance, on the one hand, we look towards the future, so Our Saviour is a digital church. The newsletter is delivered in .PDF format. Church members and church council can exchange ideas and information on an internet bulletin board. We podcast sermons and email prayer requests and follow Tweets. Some people stay connected throughout the week by texting. Many of us use Facebook for our friendly “water cooler” time. These people expect—and, I think it safe to say, need—digital communication.

But because we also honor the past, we’re also a paper church. Paper bulletins. Actual hymnals. Hard copies of newsletters for those that want them. Hard copies of church council minutes. A phone prayer chain still makes the rounds every so often. We make verbal announcements after church and have a coffee fellowship so that people can share thoughts and ideas and friendship.

There are some days that I think it would certainly be easier if we could stick to just one type of communication. If we had a different sort of church we could probably do just that. But precisely because we are what we are—an established, smaller, rural church—we have a group of people that vary in age, in technological savvy, and in communication preferences. And so we deliberately communicate across a variety of different mediums because we want to keep as many people as possible connected to the life of the church, to each other, and ultimately to Christ.

Heck yes I'm tired of being a pastor! . . . or am I?

2009-12-02T12:18:00.002-05:00

When faced with the routine (and some not routine) challenges of being a pastor, a certain pastor friend of mine is fond of saying, "Ministry is a grind." And he's right. Ministry is a long-haul vocation. It's not one that tends to provide immediate gratification. And it tends to weary you, to wear you down and tire you out over a period of time.

Let's be honest and up-front: people are sinners. Their lives are messy. They deal with each other in messy ways. Even the best people still struggle with wanting to do good but choosing evil (or ease) instead, and they get weary. And since pastors are people, too, that means pastors are subject to messy lives of their own. Add to that the burden of an intense vocation that is often relationally enmeshed, and the weariness that dealing with messy lives and messy people produces is magnified. Pastors just plain get worn down.

But another friend of mine has a saying, too. He likes to say, “I’ve read the end of the Book, and I know how it all turns out.” He means that we can cling to God’s promises, because He is faithful and true and what He says, He does. So the church will prevail in spreading her message of grace and salvation in Jesus Christ. God’s Word will continue to work repentance and faith in the hearts of those who hear it. Sin and messy lives will one day no longer wear us down. I know this is true, because God has promised it. So I don’t worry about what may happen in the future. I know how the Book ends.

So, yeah. Ministry is a grind. Pastors get weary. For that matter, I’m weary right now, this moment. But I’m not worried. God has promised good things, refreshing things, eternal things, both to me and to His Church. He will deliver on those promises in His time. There’s no doubt in my mind.

And I just discovered something: In the knowledge of that promise, I’ve just found that I’m not nearly as weary as I thought I was. God is good . . . all the time.

I heard the voice of Jesus say . . .

2009-11-25T11:59:00.003-05:00

I just re-learned something I've known for quite some time: There is truly power in God's Word. His Holy Spirit really does speak through the Scriptures.

There's no doubt in my mind that when I skimp--or skip!--on my Bible reading that I get further away from God. My thoughts are less focused upon Him and His Work, my choices become more selfish than serving. I lack clarity and purpose and . . . and, well, vision.

It's not that life gets easier or better when I'm getting fueled up by God's Word. It's not that I get richer or healthier. But what I get from God's Word is what His Spirit gives. I receive enlightenment to God's ongoing work. I receive clearer vision to do what He leads me to do, to choose the things that bring glory to Him and blessings to others. And I receive strength to stand and endure to the end.

And for someone like me, that's far better than a wealthy life, a comfortable life, or an easy life.

Wired to be a reshaper

2009-11-24T12:54:00.001-05:00

Just a few days ago I received the exciting news that my blog had been approved to be part of Mark Batterson’s blog tour for his new book Primal. Equally exciting was the news from a few weeks ago that I had been accepted into Thomas Nelson’s book review blogger program. Simply put, this means that with both of these I get a free books in exchange for reading them and posting reviews (actual reviews, not just flattery puff pieces) on my blog and on commercial sites.

Getting free books is great, but the real reason I’m pumped is because this fits exactly into how God has wired me. By nature I’m a receiver and reshaper. I tend not to create ex nihilo (fancy Latin phrase meaning “out of nothing”), but instead I take in thoughts and ideas from all manner of sources (in this case free books!), inspect them, take them apart to understand them, and then rebuild them again to fit the unique setting of my own church.

Sometimes I feel bad about this, because I feel a bit of pastoral peer pressure to be a creator of new ideas, to be a cutting-edge innovator. I get the impression even from some pastors that being a reshaper is at best a second-rate Kingdom occupation. But honestly, when I stop trying to emulate the gifts of others and instead start working in the way and manner that God has gifted me, there is no better feeling in the world! Things just click. It’s almost effortless. And confidentially, it’s a serious rush. So I’m learning to embrace the way God has wired me and learning to love working from within my gifts rather than struggling to appear to have gifts that God in His wisdom didn’t give me, but that others somehow still think I should have. I’m learning to love being a reshaper, a rebuilder, and I’m laying down the idol of being a pure innovator.

Where are we headed . . . and why am I wearing this hat?

2009-11-18T11:29:00.001-05:00

I’m a small-town pastor, so let’s face it: on any given day you’ll find me wearing a number of different hats. Some hats—like the preacher hat or planner hat—are hats that fit me well. They’re hats I love to wear, because they match my personality and how God has hard-wired me together to do certain things well. Other hats, though . . . well, they just aren’t the best fit and wearing them makes me uncomfortable. If I wear those hats for too many hours in a day and too many days in a week I find that I’m fighting against my God-given nature, and so it wears me down and makes me unproductive in all aspects of my work and ministry.

So what’s a small-town pastor to do? Money is severely limited, so adopting the mega-church practice and doing specialty hiring for a “Minister of Assimilation” (or for that matter, even a lawn maintenance guy!) is out of the question. Equally unattractive is just sucking it up and performing as best I can in areas that I was never equipped by God to really excel in, all the while having my spiritual and emotional batteries drained dry.

There’s a third option, though. It takes time. It takes patience. And it takes relying heavily upon God. But it is an option:

Trust God to bring somebody forward, train them to take on an area of ministry as their own, and turn it over to them.

Trusting is difficult because while I wait for God’s timing, I either must continue to work against my nature or simply let some things not get done. That’s unappealing to most people. Training people and turning over ministry is also difficult because there’s always the reality that they’ll end up doing ministry in some way other than the way I would choose. That’s a mighty big pill for some people to swallow.

But in the end . . . isn’t it the best way? Wouldn’t it be the most amazing, rewarding thing to see a desire for a certain ministry birthed in a person’s heart and to see them learn and grow and then go on to impact others in a way that I never could?

And wouldn’t it be great to thank God for doing something I could never do on my own?

You bet it would be. You bet it is.

So what am I—as a small-town pastor—to do? Just what I said: trust God, train people, and turn ministry over to them. Makes life difficult at times and challenging at others . . . but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Book review: Derailed: Five lessons learned from catastrophic failures of Leadership

2009-11-10T13:09:00.001-05:00

As a pastor, I appreciate reading good books on developing and maintaining healthy leadership. I believe such books help me in the important task of leading my congregation on a relational human level while doing my main work of shepherding them in Christ on a spiritual level. “Derailed” has found a spot on my shelf of valuable leadership books.

In “Derailed” Tim Irwin has brought a compelling format to a well-known topic. There is no doubt that leadership books are full of exhortations to character as being the bedrock of leadership, but Tim’s format of first profiling six highly visible leadership failures brings a new, gritty twist to the subject. The profiles served as a fun-house mirror, enabling me to see my own failures magnified to a grotesque level. The stories allowed me to see exactly how such failures cause a leadership derailment even before I got to the main content of the book. As such, Tim’s profiling in the first half of the book serves the second half (where he blends information with personal application) exceptionally well.

But without a doubt, it’s the second half of the book where this book earned its spot on my shelf. Tim’s understanding of the dimensions of character (authenticity, self-management, humility, and courage) bring what is normally a vague, ethereal quality down into measurable, quantifiable bedrock that a leader can actually stand on. And then, when he finishes up the book with simple instructions on developing specific “heart habits” in order to avoid leadership derailing, he puts that all-important factor of personal application to good and practical use.

All in all, Tim Irwin has a solid and readable leadership book in “Derailed”. I recommend it.

How to confess your sins to another, part 3

2009-10-28T17:14:00.002-04:00

Thanks for your patience for the long interval of time between my last post and this one. I’ve been distracted by ministry concerns, attended a pastors’ conference, had a personal bout with the flu, and now am ministering to my family in their time of illness. But during the month or so since my last blog post, I’ve also had time to put private confession into action in my own life, and have learned more of its benefits in the process.

Last time I mentioned how to establish and use categories as a framework for self-examination. Measuring yourself by examining your life and conduct to identify where you have fallen short and fallen into sin is a difficult—but vital—step in the confession process. But it is important that you choose the right standard to measure yourself by.

Now, here is the reality of human nature: There’s not a single one of us who doesn’t consider ourselves as somehow being better than other people. I’m not sure why that it, exactly. I suspect it’s a kind of coping mechanism: if we can convince ourselves of our moral superiority over others, we can manage to convince ourselves that we alone are unique and special (and thus important) in God’s economy. And so each of us tend to magnify certain sins as being more heinous than others, and rarely (if indeed ever) will those sins be something that we personally struggle with. Conversely, the sins that we do harbor in our lives we tend to minimize, believing them to be merely part of human nature or a natural, human, and perhaps even beneficial reaction or response to our upbringing or current life situation.

What this means is this: We tend to measure ourselves and others by our own standard; a standard we create in our own minds and is as inherently favorable to our own lives as it is unjust to others.

Let me offer an example. I recall talking with a work acquaintance once who was complaining bitterly about the drivers on the interstate during the morning commute. As people do, they would get in a hurry and in an effort to not be late for work, many would regularly break the clearly posted speed limit of 55 mph. That particular morning, he had had several drivers tailgating him, trying to push him to go faster. But he refused to change his speed. As he said, “I’ve got my cruise control set to 62, and I don’t think you need to be going any faster than that.”

You see what my friend did, right? He created a standard and made himself the judge of what speed was safe and reasonable. But the standard was arbitrary. It didn’t reflect what was actually right or wrong, on what speed would actually break the law, but only what he thought was good enough for himself, and thus good enough for everybody else. Anyone who wanted to exceed his personal speed limit was labeled reckless or dangerous, but he himself (who was nevertheless breaking the law) was okay.

And this is what you and I both do naturally inside our heads all the time. We rationalize that our standard is good and people who exceed that are bad. We determine the relative value of others by what we have chosen to use as a measuring tool. We make value judgments based upon our own standard. In other words, we set ourselves up as God. And by the way . . . when you’re God—when you’re the judge and jury of what is right and wrong—it’s not likely that you’re going to see a need to go to confession. You will miss out on God’s amazing blessing of hearing the words, “You are forgiven” because deep down you don’t believe that you really need them.

So how do you avoid that? The answer is simple: measure yourself not by your own standard, but by God’s. Measure yourself according to the 10 Commandments.

When you measure yourself by God’s standard, the false pretenses tend to fall away pretty quickly. You realize that you’re not quite as good as you thought you were when you were busy measuring others according to your own worth. But what you see as you look in the mirror of God’s standard is a sinner. A law-breaker. Peer into the mirror of God’s law and you will see that the verdict “guilty” applies to you. To you yourself.

Now I admit that’s not really all that great in and of itself. But think about all we’ve talked about so far. When you readily see your sin (and this is true sin, sin that you can clearly see has failed to live up to God’s standard), you can bring it out in the open in confession. You can take off the false mask of self-righteousness and openly acknowledge that you are a sinner in need of grace. And you can hear that those sins, those sins that have made you guilty of breaking God’s standard and therefore make you worthy of death . . . you can hear that those specific sins are truly forgiven.

You can have a life free from a false standard. You can learn to take great comfort in the fact that others don’t have to measure up to you and that you don’t have to measure up to others. And even when you fail to measure up to God’s standard, you can still know through confession that in Jesus Christ your very real sins are very truly forgiven.

How to confess your sins to another, continued

2009-10-07T12:13:00.001-04:00

God intends confession to be a gift for you. A gift whereby you can be comforted in knowing that a specific sin has indeed been forgiven. That truth alone should help encourage you to confession! But when you get there, how should you begin? What should you confess? You are probably already going to be just a bit nervous, so how do you even begin to identify which of your sins has burdened you enough to drive you to confession?

There of lots of times where lots of Christians are content with saying, “I am a sinner.” They will say it by rote, knowing it is true and yet not examining the depths of what that means. Looking too closely at one’s own sin presses the already uncomfortable truth of the rote statement into the realm of the concrete . . . the actual . . . the measurable. Self-examination proves to them that not only are they generic sinners, but that they can actually name real, true, gross, and all-too apparent sins in their lives. Lots of Christians don’t like that, so they don’t do it.

But not you. You’re still reading this blog series on confession, so you want something more. You’re not content with the status quo, a generic faith, an unexamined life. You have purposed in your heart that you will bravely look into the dark shadows of your own soul and drag the ugliness you find there wriggling and fighting and biting into the open and kill it through confession. So . . . how do you do it? How do you examine yourself to find that sin?

I like to suggest that you first approach confession by establishing categories that you can use to examine your own conduct. Establishing some categories will benefit your self-examination by making it more methodical and less generic. You want to get to specifics, but remember that neither do you want to get bogged down in extremely minute details. So in general the broader the categories are, the better. You might consider categories such as “work, world, and family.” I personally grew up using the categories of “thoughts, words, and deeds.” If you’re troubled by a specific a personal sin, however, you might consider getting a little more specific with that one sin and develop some categories such as “avoiding temptation, resisting temptation, and thinking rightly.”

Whatever categories you choose for your own use, what you should do with them is reflect on how well (or indeed how poorly) you exhibited the character of Christ in each of those categories in the past week. This means not only did you actively resist evil, but did you actively pursue what is good? At your work, for instance: Did you refuse to join in the slanderous office gossip? And if so, did you slink away or did you make a specific effort to speak well of the person who was the target of such talk? Remember: It is just as much of a sin to omit good as it is to commit evil.

This process of actually looking for sin in your life will not be comfortable, I’ll admit. But it will be beneficial. As you examine more and more of your life, bringing the sin you find into the light where it can be seen in all its true ugliness, you will also see more and more of the cross of Christ. You will come to treasure the cross more, to more fully understand just how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. Confession will be God’s gift to you.

CUTTING school budgets???

2009-09-24T16:41:00.001-04:00

Please allow me to interrupt my regular blogging series with a plea for the education of the children. Below is a letter I composed to Senator Cameron Brown, Michigan State Senator, 16th Senate District. I urge residents of Lenawee County to contact him immediately and plea on behalf of the children.

Senator Brown's contact information can be found on his web page: http://www.senate.michigan.gov/gop/senators/brown.asp?District=16

Senator Brown,

If the article in the Adrian Telegram is correct (http://www.lenconnect.com/news/x576521365/Schools-could-face-steep-funding-cut), I understand that up to $218 per student could be cut from the Michigan state education budget.

I find this proposal unacceptable. The education of our children is an investment in the future. A solid future for Michigan?whether we consider health care, economics, even public safety?depends upon the solid foundation of a sound education. Imperil that foundation by stripping away much-needed funds and we guarantee a bleak future for all of Michigan.

My wife and I homeschool by choice, but I know many families and children in our little community that rely upon our local public school. Our local school system already struggles financially to provide the education that they do. How can we make it harder on the schools and still say we want Michigan to have a bright future? Please do all that you can to ensure our schools have all the money they need to teach our precious children.

Sincerely,

Troy Neujahr
Hudson, Michigan

How to confess your sins to another

2009-09-24T14:08:00.004-04:00

It seems a silly question. Something that when it is brought up, the word “no-brainer” comes to mind. But still, the question is a very real dilemma for most (if not all!) Christians: “How do I confess my sins?”

Now almost immediately a well-intentioned Christian will jump into this discussion and say, “Oh that’s simple! Just say, “God, I’m sorry that I _________.” But recall . . . we’re not talking about the relatively easy task of confession before God. We’re talking about confessing your sins directly to another Christian. And therein begins the difficulty for most Christians. “Which sins do I confess?” “You mean even those really nasty ones?” “Do I have to name them ALL??”

What about that? Is it necessary to name every single sin before another Christian? Must you keep a detailed log of your sinful activity so that you can confess fully? Should you spend hours preparing your list of sins so that when you come to confession you can be sure to get it right?

Oh heavens no! Trying to name every single sin in confession changes it from a grace-centered into a law-centered work of righteouesness. It overshadows a rich gift of God and threatens to turn it into a self-righteous work. To paraphrase a good friend of mine, “Confession is made for man, not man for confession.”

So, no. Do not agonize over every single minute sin in confession. Do not rack your brain and try to invent sins that you have committed in order to confess them. If there is nothing particularly troubling you, if you have not committed any heinous, gross acts in the past week or so . . . well then you may feel free to name whatever sin you can recall. Don’t further burden your conscience and turn confession into a difficult chore; let it be the gift of God intends it to be: for you to be comforted by hearing that a specific sin has indeed been forgiven.

Next week: More on how you confess your sins to another Christian

Can't I just confess directly to God?

2009-09-16T16:53:00.002-04:00

Can’t I just confess right to God?

Whew! It’s been a long time since I last updated the blog. Too long, in fact. I confess that I’ve allowed other concerns of ministry and life to overshadow this important discussion.

Which, incidentally, brings me to the next topic in this blog series on confession. When teaching or preaching about the churchly practice of confession and absolution, I routinely hear the same argument. I get asked, “Yes, I understand what you are saying about confession, pastor . . . but why can’t I just confess right to God? Why should I confess to anyone else, pastor or not?”

Strangely enough, this is a variation on the oldest copout for not attending church: “I can worship God on my own just as well as I can in a church!” It’s what I call the “This is just between me and God” argument. And the thing of it is . . . it’s true.

Sure, it’s true. You can worship God alone in a field or on a mountaintop just as well as you can worship alone in a church. And it’s true that you can confess your sins privately to God and receive His forgiveness through Jesus Christ. These things are true because Jesus Christ comes to each of us personally and offers His gift of life and salvation to us as individuals. Intimacy with God, salvation from God, is an intensely personal thing.

Yet exceedingly rare is the person who can live privately without any need for community. People tend to seek people out for friendship, for partnership, for the blessing of togetherness. People are inherently social animals, and so they will join clubs founded upon their unique interests. They will form casual groups at water coolers. They will seek ways to be with other people or they will pine away without interpersonal contact.

Community is especially important to people. And nowhere on Earth is the sense of “community” stronger or more firmly grounded in a bond of common experience than it is in God’s church. For there are two fundamental realities that bond me as a church attender to every other single church attender: the reality that I myself am a sinner and the reality that I am forgiven in Christ.

Therefore, I suggest that the last place on earth that you would want to hide your sins away from another person would be in the church! Rather, the church should be the safest place in the world to be able to confess to weaknesses and failures and frustrations and struggles and temptations and yes, even sins . . . because our sin is one of the only two good reasons there are for going to church, and the other is because we are forgiven of them.

When you force yourself to verbally confess to another Christian (or, again, especially your pastor), you are actually receiving several gifts—each of great value—from God:

To begin with, you receive the gift of obedience. God’s own Word says in James 5:16, “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” It is a simple command with profound implications. In that passage James indicates that everything from personal physical health to the vitality of the spiritual community could be negatively impacted by unconfessed sin. God therefore commands that we not try to hide away our sin and thus let it fester, but confess our sins to one another.

A second gift from God in confession is that confessing a particular sin has a way of killing off that sin. There is something about the nature of sin in that is like a nasty fungus or a mold: it thrives in the shadows, unobserved in the corners, it lives best when it dwells in secrecy and darkness. When sin is hidden away and not talked about, when it is not openly confessed, it has a tendency to grow stronger. But when it is dragged into the light and revealed for what it truly is it tends to wither and die off (For a Biblical reference, see I John 1:5-10 as John explores this connection between light/darkness and righteousness/sin.).

Openly and verbally confessing your sin to another individual drags your sin into the light in a way that privately confessing to God simply does not. Of course, that’s probably going to be very uncomfortable for you, at least at first. It means that somebody you know will know your specific sins. That will feel risky to you and more than a bit dangerous to your carefully cultivated mask of holiness and good works. But that mask hides the reality underneath that sin nevertheless exists in your life! Confessing your sins to another takes off the mask, brings sin into the light, and allows you to live under the cross and not behind a mask.

The third gift in confession is directly related to the second. It is the gift of humility—both for the one confessing as well as the one hearing the confession.

Paul speaks highly of the virtue of humility, saying in Philippians 2:5-8, “5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross!” Jesus Christ did not falsely exalt Himself, but was willing to be numbered among the sinners. This was humbling for Him, and a great departure from the way the world operates.

Humility is a virtue worth cultivating in your Christian life simply because it is Christ-like and un-worldly. And there is no better method I know of by which a right view of oneself (read: humility) can be actively cultivated than by the regular, routine, and habitual confessing of personal sins to another person. It is a regular reminder that I am not holier than others, that I am not superior to other, that it is as impossible for me to please God apart from Christ as it is for me to touch the sun on Icarus’ wings. And so I begin to think not more highly of myself than I ought, but think of myself rightly, and thus depend upon Christ, His grace, and His cross all the more. And what a blessing that is for a Christian to do!

But even beyond that, it is an extraordinarly humbling experience to hear the confession of another. The temptation even of the father confessor (the fancy name for “one hearing the confession”) is to keep the lie of the sinner’s mask of false holiness intact and let the other’s sin remain in the dark. It’s easier that way because it’s difficult to know a person’s deepest failures and sins without looking at them differently. It’s more comfortable that way because, after all, hearing the sins of another confessed out loud tends to make one squirm. But the mask is a lie, and the father confessor would rather see sin brought into the light of God’s truth, and so he listens and is humbled.

But the single-most humbling thing in hearing confession is not actually the hearing, but the proclaiming. No Christian confession is complete without Christ’s forgiveness being proclaimed! And when the father confessor proclaims that forgiveness it feels to him presumptuous. It feels like as though it smacks of pride to dare speak those words of forgiveness. “After all”, he thinks, “who can forgive sins but God alone? How can I dare stand in God’s place and speak words that only belong to Him?”

Yet it is those words, “Go in peace, your sins are forgiven” that are the very words that the confessor’s brother or sister in Christ need to hear. They need to be comforted with words of grace and mercy and Gospel. And so the confessor swallows his pride, wraps himself in the clothing of God’s servant, and humbly serves his brother in Christ by giving him the words he needs most. He may tremble at the responsibility of offering Christ’s forgiveness, but he nevertheless does so that his brother’s conscience may be salved with the soothing balm of pure Gospel.

And there we have it. The benefits of confessing sins to one another are benefits for the whole community of Christ: benefits of a humble walk of faith, lives lived without masks, and mutual dependence upon God’s Word and Christ’s cross. Yes, it is true that you can confess to God and God alone, but in doing so you rob yourself and the church of Christ of a rich and yet humbling act that brings God’s blessings to the entire community.

Confession is not counseling

2009-09-01T15:45:00.002-04:00

Confession is NOT counseling

I’ll say it again, confession is NOT counseling. To get the most out of confession, the distinction between the two needs to be understood. The two are different things with different purposes that are even done differently! And yet I perceive that the average churchgoer doesn’t understand that difference, tends to consider confession and counseling as being very, very similar, and thus robs themselves of the special blessing God has for them in confession. So let’s talk about the difference between the two things for just a minute and hopefully, in the end, we’ll appreciate confession for its unique contribution to our daily lives in Christ.

First off, let’s defuse any potential argument by agreeing where confession and counseling (in this case, specifically pastoral counseling) are similar. 1) When done correctly, they both rest on the foundation of God’s Word. God’s Word offers guidance and direction for us as we live this life, and we should recognize that and allow our pastors to speak God’s Word to us. 2) When done correctly, both confession and counseling are done with a pastor’s heart that seeks to heal brokenness and bind up wounds. And 3) Strictly speaking, it is the duty of every Christian—and not just the pastor—to both hear confession and offer Godly counsel. It is, of course, nevertheless something that the pastor is specifically called to do as part of his vocation of ministry.

So yes, confession and counseling have some similarities. But as I can imagine my grandfather possibly saying, “Just because it has teats, tail, and teeth doesn’t mean it’s a cow!” Similarities do not mean that two things are identical. And though I’m in danger of belaboring the point, confession and counseling are NOT one and the same.

Pastoral counseling is in order when a crisis of any form shakes up a person’s life and they need Godly assistance sorting and arranging the various bits and pieces back into a meaningful, healthy whole. This sort of counseling can range from dispensing Biblical wisdom in a single session (what I call the “church-member drive-by”, it begins with a parishioner popping their head in my door and asking, “Got a minute?” and ends anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours later!) to wrestling with a complex set of interrelated issues over multiple sessions (as in premarital counseling, for instance). Such counseling t is what 2 Timothy 3:16-17 looks like in action: “16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” In other words, pastoral counseling is in my estimation mostly useful for rebuilding or establishing a Biblical worldview that will serve to guide an individual in the path of righteousness.

Not so with confession. Whereas the primary usefulness of counseling is in rebuilding, confession’s main point is reconciliation. It is the simple understanding that one’s own sinful choices have strained or even perhaps broken one’s relationship with God and the desire to have the comfort of being right with God once again. That understanding leads them to confession, where the full truth of God’s Word will be pronounced upon them: the truth that while sin does separate, Jesus Christ nevertheless forgives and reconciles.

This means that the beauty of confession is that it does not require a crisis in order to function as a valuable part of the Christian’s life! Imagine how weary you would be if every week you had to endure yet another crisis that required counseling, and yet adding regular confession to your spiritual disciplines of prayer, study, and worship gives the rare combination of being both easy and rewarding.

The reason is this: confession’s words of forgiveness are just as valid for monumental moral lapses as they are for life’s small daily sins. The confessor does not need to have committed atrocities or feel an incapacitating burden of sin . . . they only need to know that 1) they have indeed sinned and 2) in Christ, God stands ready, willing, and able to forgive them for that sin!

Counseling offers guidance and hope for the future, but confession grants peace and comfort for right now. Counseling offers a plethora of Scriptural advice, but confession needs no Scripture other than 1 John 1:9, “9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Counseling is training for righteousness, confession declares one righteous.

No, confession and counseling are NOT the same. Both are good, but when it comes down to it, while counseling might be good guidance, confession is pure Gospel.

What is confession?

2009-08-26T12:46:00.005-04:00

As we begin in earnest this blog series on the churchly practice of Confession and Absolution, I believe it makes sense to answer the basic question first:

What is confession?

There are probably enough people who have enough familiarity with the practice of confession to answer that. "Oh, confession! That's where you go into a little box in the church every so often and confess your sins to a priest.? And to that I say "No, it's not." What's just been described is an action, not the essence. A mental picture of a physical deed, but not what confession is.

What is, fundamentally speaking, confession? What is its essence? What is the thing that makes confession what it is?

When we dig deep enough down we can begin to properly understand what confession is. Confession is, at its heart, a Godly sorrow over one's own sins. It is not a sorrow that indulges in self-flagellation, a constant and bizarre psychosis which believes that somehow heaping enough abuse on one's own ego will be sufficient to cure sin. Neither is it a self-centered sorrow that mourns only the negative effects that sin?s consequences have brought into one's own life. Confession is a Godly sorrow: a sorrow that is compelled to seek out the cross and Christ's forgiveness there offered. In that aspect it is much like the distinction we tend to make between remorse and regret.

When a particularly heinous crime has been committed and the perpetrator caught, people begin to watch him very closely. They want to see whether or not he feels truly sorry for what he has done. And if he does not, it is almost inevitable that when his trial has come and he is about to be sentenced the prosecuting lawyer will argue for a stronger sentence and claim, "Never once has this man shown any remorse!"

Now contrast that with an event like a nationally known politician who has been caught in a scandal of some type. With his shameful conduct exposed for all the world to see, he quickly arranges a press conference in which he reads a prepared statement that more often than not goes, "I regret my actions . . ."

Typically, we see a person expressing regret only after they have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The person in question regrets the damage that he has done to his career. He regrets ever having made such a bad choice in the first place. In short, he wishes that things could be different in this aspect: he regrets that he ever got caught. It is primarily self-centered, self-occupied, and self-preserving.

Remorse, on the other hand, is typically viewed as being true sorrow. Not just sorrow over being caught, not even sorrow over the destructive consequences of an action, but sorrow over the action itself. It is an other-centered lamenting over an injury (be it emotional, verbal, or physical) that cannot be taken back or undone.

When it comes to confession, then, remorse is a type of sorrow over sin that the world does not understand or, in fact, feel. Remorse is Godly sorrow. The Apostle Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 7:10, "Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death."

In confession, Godly sorrow seeks out a confessor that will hear of my sins, will hear my acknowledgement that I have injured others and sinned against God, will hear my cry for mercy, and will pronounce God's judgment upon me. Godly sorrow seeks out God's judgment, because by faith it already knows what His verdict is: "Guilty of sin, and yet forgiven in Jesus Christ."

Godly sorrow leads to salvation! It leads to salvation because it trusts in the cross of Jesus Christ above all else. Godly sorrow knows that even the reality of my own sin, my own disregard for God?s holy commands, cannot separate me from God, because the blood of Jesus Christ, dripping down from the cross, has already earned forgiveness for me! It knows the sting of the verdict of "guilty" but does not fear it, because it also knows that the true words "and yet forgiven" will also be spoken. And so Godly sorrow seeks out confession.

Wordly sorrow, however, fears God's judgment so much that it would rather hide from it and instead judge itself. And so it flees from confession and consoles itself with the words, "I'm not as bad as some others." It lies to itself by saying, "None of this would be a problem if I hadn't been caught." And strangely enough, worldly sorrow often fears God's judgment so badly that it would rather condemn itself, saying, "I'm worthless. I'm an idiot. I'm unlovable."

Worldly sorrow leads to death . . . because it leads me away from God?s judgment. It leads me away from confession. It has no hope, it has no trust. It only knows fear and deceit. It is a lying trap that flees the hope and forgiveness offered by the cross of Christ.

So what is confession? Confession is, at its root, Godly sorrow. A sorrow that acknowledges the reality of sin, and yet trusts in the reality of the cross all the more. It is a sorrow that knows the path to salvation and trusts in it enough to follow it.

Confession has two parts . . .

2009-08-19T14:22:00.002-04:00

The church's ancient practice of private confession has much to offer God's people, and yet I see that it is frequently misunderstood and consistently underused. I wonder why that is?. Why, when the practice of confession has a Biblical foundation, solid theological backing, and enormous personal benefit, is it so often dismissed?

The Lutheran fathers themselves encouraged private confession and strove to retain it in the church even after their break from Rome, and yet modern-day Lutherans shun the practice as being "too Catholic." Evangelicals often place great stock in person-to-person accountability, but yet they frequently dismiss the churchly practice of private confession as being entirely unnecessary. In my experience even Roman Catholics--the very group most people would expect to practice private confession--are uninformed of the practice and generally consider it an antiquated practice belonging to a bygone era.

I'm thinking that's really too bad. It saddens me to think that private confession has, for many--probably most, actually--Christians, gone the way of the dodo. It's not just that private confession seems strange. After all, fasting is awful strange, too, and there are no end of books on that subject. For that matter, fasting even seems to achieve fad status once per decade or so. It gets to the point where you can't invite 1/2 of the church out for after-worship lunch as they're all fasting for one thing or another!

So I've come to the conclusion that the reason private confession isn't done much anymore is not just that it seems odd to people, but it must be something more. Perhaps it's misunderstood. Perhaps it has a certain stigma. Perhaps people just plain don't understand it. So what can I do? If only there were some way that I could write about confession and instruct people on just how fine and wonderful it truly is. If only I had some avenue, some way of reaching out via an electronic medium to untold numbers of Christians . . .

*idea*

Yes, you've guessed it. I'm starting off a blog series on the practice of private confession. Why? Because I think it's a valuable practice, and I'd like to encourage you to think about it and try it out, no matter what your denominational stripe may be. It is valuable because of what it does and what it offers: conviction and forgiveness.

You Christians know from personal experience how those two things go hand in hand, but have you ever wondered how they are worked out in practical, actual ways? Have you ever struggled with doubt over whether your internal battles with lust or greed or coveting had crossed the line and spilled out into your life in the form of actual sin? And did you ever wonder, "Is this something I need to confess to God?" And have you ever been so burdened by a sin that you longed to hear God Himself declare to you, "Your sins are forgiven" just so that you could know that you know that you know it was really, actually, true?

If you've ever struggled with doubt, asking yourself the question, "Yes . . . but how do I really know I'm forgiven?", then I invite you to come along with me as together we explore the ancient and beneficial practice of private confession. It is my hope that our explorations will both challenge and edify you, but it is my certainty that they will not leave you disappointed.

A review of Matthew Harrison’s, “It’s Time: LCMS Unity and Mission”

2009-07-28T13:27:00.002-04:00

Although it was written nearly one year ago (October of 2008), I have only recently been made aware of Matthew C. Harrison’s paper addressing the woeful divisions of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod entitled, “It’s Time: LCMS Unity and Mission”. Knowing Matthew to be a man possessing both conservative, sound doctrine as well as a genuine heart for seeking and saving the lost (as evidenced by his lengthy and excellent work with LCMS World Mission), I immediately set out to read it and e-publish a review, and I must say from the outset that I’m extremely glad that I did.

Matt opens with a compelling illustration; an ocean-going ship that is occupied by a crew that is one small part bitterly opposed to her course, one part radically committed to her course, and a large majority that are apathetic as regards to the ship altogether. What can be done?

Immediately, upon the first page, Matt’s paper has won my respect. For he acknowledges that while simply putting the matter to a vote and accepting the will of the majority may be fine for an actual ship, it nevertheless is destructive and divisive when the metaphorical ship is in actuality the church. Or perhaps the crew majority could simply rid themselves of the impure influences of the losers? Ridding ourselves of opposition by jettisoning all mutineers and extra baggage through force is acceptable upon the high seas, but it is the very antithesis of the redeeming and reconciling truth of the Gospel that we hold to in faith. The answer, Matt rightly points out, is not coercion, but consensus.

It is this point of consensus and not coercion that he expands upon, revisits, and in some ways revises throughout the rest of the paper. Matt takes the historical and present challenges of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod along with a refreshing splash of respected Reformers (such as Luther and Chemnitz) and an explicit reliance upon the Scriptures as the rule and norm of faith, and wonderfully and expertly weaves together into a tapestry that reveals that the fundamental problem we face in the LC-MS today is not one of structure nor of power and control but, as Matt says, a “lack of faith in the power of the Word to unite even us.”

And BOOM! . . . Matt nails it. Look at the divisions that persist in the LC-MS. Look at the things we argue over. And then look at how we try to resolve them: Through vilifying one another in internet forums and blogs, through campaigning for the “right person” to be elected into Synodical office, through resolutions that seek the full compliance of other parties and factions . . . in other words: through coercion. We have long since stopped believing that the Word of God is living and active and able to bring about the good and pleasing unity that God desires.

Matt’s answer is as radical as it is simple: That we first repent of our own sinful divisiveness, that we actively listen to the Word of God for guidance, and then that we actively listen to one another. Simply put, Matt Harrison dares to offer the radical, unheard of suggestion that we actually rely upon the Word of God, and in particular His Gospel, to be our rule of faith and life at home, in our churches . . . and even in our Synod.

That, my friends, is profound. It is provocative. And it is the very reason why I’m heartily recommending Matt’s paper to you to read for yourself. His is a clarion call back to what matters most: Christ at the center of all.

What if we were to embrace that notion? To really, truly embrace it? To repent of our own lack of faith in the transforming power of God’s Word, to repent of our own feeble and weak attempts to fix Synod through restructuring, through programs, through solicitation of financial support . . . and instead say with radical, uncompromising, unfaltering conviction that Jesus Christ IS at the center of every single one of our decisions, and that we will heed His Word in every aspect of our lives together?

I’ll tell you what would happen: exactly what Matt suggests will happen. That we will come to be missionally doctrinal and doctrinally missional. That both active mission endeavors and pure doctrine will be held in high, high regard. That we will be able once again to express our given unity in Christ to one another and for the benefit of the world that looks on.

“It’s time for us to be united in doctrine and mission, doctrine for mission in order “to seek and save the lost.” It’s time to be about mission and mercy. It is tme to tend the fellowship (koinonia) we have been given in Christ, and to care for one another. Christ is with us, and the world is before us. It’s time to face the real problem and to address it once and for all. “Let’s go!” (Mark 1:38). It’s time!”—Matthew C. Harrison

Matthew C. Harrison’s paper “It’s Time: LCMS Unity And Mission” can be viewed and/or downloaded at http://www.itistime.org/

On social media and virtual relationships What I've learned to value in them

2009-07-02T15:59:00.002-04:00

Are so-called "virtual relationships" valid? I have a good number of internet-only friends (friends I've never met in real life, but nevertheless whom I've associated with for several years online), and I value their friendship immensely. I've been thinking a fair bit recently about the validity of online relationships and the value I place in them.

It began while I was on a vacation recently. Traveling away from home for me meant no internet access unless I happened across a Wi-Fi hotspot. This provided an opportunity to disconnect from the ubiquitous curse/blessing of Microsoft Outlook and the friendly chime alerting me to an incoming email, but it also forced me to disconnect (partially, as it turned out) from my circle of online friends. No pastors forum. No Facebook. No Old Lutheran. None of those regular and expected channels of communication were open to me for a period of about two weeks.

I noticed a few things. One, I didn't experience the withdrawal symptoms of an internet addict. I felt no compulsion to stop at a trendy Starbucks to get a double fix of caffeine and 'net, nor the need to haul out my laptop just because the interstate rest stop advertised free Wi-Fi access. It was good to break away from everything that was "back home" and focus a bit more on the here and now of traveling and seeing family.

But I also noticed a distinct difference in the make-up of my Twitter tweets (you can follow me @troyneujahr). Whereas normally I'd confine a tweet to a work-related ministry question, something that was perhaps intended to start a conversation or give insight into a pastor's day, on vacation my tweets started to take on a new flavor. With no possibility of entering into a discussion with my online community, I started to view my tweets as a sort of mini-postcard. I'd think of my online friends as I typed out 140 characters of "What I'm doing now", and in my mind there?d always be a little additional tagline of "Wish you were here." A Twitter update became my way of thinking fondly of my online friends for a few moments and expressing (albeit obliquely) a longing for the coming day when we could freely converse once again.

I can only think of one possibility for my behavior: in my mind, the relationships I've formed online are genuine relationships that mirror person-to-person relationships in every way. I have casual acquaintances in real life with whom I can pass a few moments of pleasant conversation, and I have the same type of acquaintances online. I also have a select, limited number of deep personal friends in real life whom I rely upon for advice and support, but I also have the same type of online friends, as well. One friend in particular is a man that I have NEVER met in real life, but I nevertheless have no doubt that if I were to show up at his home unannounced I would be welcomed as a cherished and long-time friend . . . because that is what we are, despite the limitations of online, virtual communication.

What's more, I have also recently learned that a virtual friendship can actually create a bond that, when brought into real life, is almost immediately transferable. At our recent LC-MS Michigan District convention, for instance, I bumped into a few folks that I have connected with on Facebook. In each instance, I saw them from a short distance away, recognized them from their online profile, and introduced myself saying, "We're friends on Facebook." Without fail there was a second or two of visible mental processing followed by an "Oh yeah! Good to meet you!", and then a few pleasant and enjoyable minutes of conversation. Not the awkward sort of first-meeting conversation, either, but rather a continuation of what we knew of each other from the virtual world. Virtual friendship transferred quickly and easily into real-world friendship.

Can virtual friendships entirely replace real-world face-to-face contact? No, I'd never suggest that it could. In the case of the church worship service, for instance, there is a necessity of a flesh-and-blood gathering of human beings meeting consistently around Word and Sacrament. "Virtual worship" remains, in my mind, a self-defeating term. Likewise, the relationship of me to my best friend (save Christ), namely my wife Stephanie, is something that could never be replicated online.

But consider what true friendship really is: two people learning to understand and appreciate one another for who they are. Seeing each other in a variety of different contexts, seeing each other through a variety of life events?both crises and celebrations. Two people interacting in friendly banter, in arguments, in difference of opinions, in requests for prayers, and in mutual consolation. Two people supporting one another, loving one another, and befriending one another.

Through the blessing of the internet, God has given me such friendships. Some in real life, some online. It's a blessing for which I'm extremely thankful. And I've learned that, when it comes to friendship, there is no such thing as a "virtual friend" . . . there are only friends that I've met in person and friends that I have not.

Thank you, Lord, for those friends.

If the city prospers, you will prosper

2009-06-03T15:38:00.001-04:00

I've found myself in deep thought lately over my church's current financial crisis. And not surprisingly, I've focused a lot of attention to what changes we can make here to get back on track money-wise and get back into the game of outreach.

But then I realized something about myself . . . something that I didn't like. What I had done was fall prey to the classic trap of inward focus. Not that I lost a heart for the unchurched and lost, no, not that. But what I had done is treated my church's financial ills as being isolated from the ongoing woes of my community. The Lord turned my mind to an important passage from Jeremiah, where even as He told the Israelites that He would be carrying them off from their homeland and into exile, He also instructed them to pray for the peace and prosperity of the city to which they were being taken . . . for if the city prospered, they too would prosper. I realized that even though He had to discipline the Israelites for their sin, He still had a heart of compassion for them that sought their greater good.

I liked that verse so much that I printed it up and stuck it on my office door. For to me it was a important reminder that the financial problems of Our Saviour Lutheran Church are directly connected to the troubled economy of Hudson, and indeed of all lower Michigan.

And then I repented for having a heart of love for my city, but hands and feet that had been idle and not done all that they could do for my city.

So today I got on my battle armor. I put on my clerical shirt and collar and drove out to the local industrial park and walked right into three of the big manufacturers out there, announced who I was and that all I wanted to do was talk with somebody who could tell me specifically how to pray for them.

And all three gave me something to pray for. Not just one, but all three. Each business said, "Pray for _________ for us and the people who work here."

That amazed me, honestly. I knew the local situation was bleak, but I hadn't expected a three-for-three acknowledgment that the situation was beyond their control and that they needed Divine intervention to get through not just the months ahead, but this very day.

I want my church to prosper, because if it prospers we keep on gathering to hear the Gospel week in and week out. We continue to be a mission outpost that offers the unconditional love and mercy and grace and favor offered by God and given through Jesus Christ.

And for the church to prosper, I need my city to prosper, as well. Major local employers are in incredibly vulnerable positions right now. Jobs are on the line. Familes are hanging in the balance.

So today, I begin daily prayer not just for my church, but for my city. Because if it prospers, so will the Gospel outreach of this church.

Join with me in prayer. Pray that my prayers are effective and powerful. Pray that God enables the city of Hudson to prosper, and that as the city prospers, so does His church.

Church idolatry--literally

2009-05-27T11:19:00.001-04:00

Lately I've been reading from the book of Ezekiel; an intimidating book at the best of times and at the worst just flat-out bizarre. But today something struck me full-on in the face: the Israelites idolized a building.

In Ezekiel 24:21, the Lord says, "21 Say to the house of Israel, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am about to desecrate my sanctuary-- the stronghold in which you take pride, the delight of your eyes, the object of your affection. The sons and daughters you left behind will fall by the sword."

And there it was: it's the building that the ancient Israelites trusted in . . . the building that they loved. Not the God who dwelt there, who came close to His people through the building . . . but the building itself.

It's not that I have a problem with buildings. They are useful and convenient. But the thing that got me to thinking was how easy it is to confuse bricks and mortar with mission. To confuse the building where God's people gather with God's church. These are NOT the same things.

The ancient Israelites had come to a point where they loved the building more than the God who dwelt there. I understand how it happened. After all, the building is rich with tradition and history. It's something you can touch and see and enter into. God, on the other hand, is somewhat nebulous . . . always hiding His face . . . always working through mysterious means.

But in the end, it didn't matter. Because the Israelites had loved the earthly building instead of what it was truly supposed to represent, the only merciful thing God could do was to take it away from them so that they would know that He was The Lord. So that they would be reminded once again that He, and not a building, alone was to be worshipped.

I wonder . . . does God look into our hearts and wonder "Should I take away their building, as well?"

And what would happen if He did?

(Dare to) Disagree with Driscoll

2009-05-21T15:23:00.002-04:00

Let me preface what I'm about to say:

I love Mark Driscoll and admire his ministry. As a preacher, I admire how the man pulls no punches when he speaks. As a pastor, I listen closely when he speaks on effective pastoral leadership. As a Christian, I thank God for the man's podcasts and Bible teaching that feed my life (sure, there's the issue of Driscoll's Calvinist theology that I strenuously disagree with, but hey . . . no one's got absolutely perfect theology, right? Except perhaps Luther. And LC-MS Lutherans. But I digress . . . :) )

But in this article from FoxNews, I think Driscoll's got just one thing--one rather small thing--wrong.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519517,00.html

Driscoll, in my opinion, is spot-on for his region of the country and where he routinely ministers. In those places (and in others), the long-useless brand of nominal, culturally-influenced "Christendom" (his term) is indeed dead. Where Driscoll serves, I believe that there is a strong distinction between authentic Christ-followers and people who formerly would have been mere church-goers . . . people who have not had a life-transforming relationship with the living God

But that's not quite as true in rural mid-America.

The Scriptures speak of people who are hearers of the Word, but not doers. In other words, people to whom the Word is preached, people who are in church regularly, but people for whom (for one reason or another) the Word has just not made a transforming impact on their lives. They consider themselves Christian, but in their minds the word means something other than what it is intended to mean: One who follows Christ. Who learns from His words. Whose life is constantly being shaped and molded, day in and day out, to resemble His.

It's these "hearers" that Driscoll calls "Christendom America." And he--rightfully so, in my opinion--rejoices over the fact that the number of people in that category are apparently diminishing nation-wide.

But again, it's a bit different story in rural mid-America. Here "Christendom America" is far from dead. Coughing, wheezing, and spluttering perhaps . . . but the beast is far from dead. Here in mid-America, far removed from cultural and urban centers, Christianity-as-culture still lives on.

There's good points to that, of course. It means that terms like "traditional morality" still mean something. That one-man, one-woman marriages for life are still kind of expected, that we're all still kind of shocked when our teens experiment with sex and/or drugs, that a good, honest day's work is still viewed as the best way to get a good, honest day's pay. Rural mid-America still has solid echoes of the simpler, easier times of the USA.

But where "Christendom America" fails, it does so completely. Because "Christendom America" uses religion and morality to innoculate people against the genuine repentance and faith of the transformed Christian. It believes that because it has the former, it can substitute it for the latter . . . and, in fact, it tragically sees no difference between the two.

So where Driscoll has the blessing of proclaiming the risen and ascended Christ to a proud and willfully pagan people, here in mid-America the pastors often fight a different battle. We fight the battle of apathy. We fight the battle of a lack of urgency. We fight the battle for souls that casually say "Lord, Lord" on Sunday, but who are woefully inadequate in Biblical knowledge, in spiritual growth, and in Christian maturity. All because they still believe that the religion and morality of "Christendom" and the transformational new life of "Christianity" are one and the same.

Yes, of course even in rural mid-America we see some of the same cultural shifts that Driscoll talks about. The fruits of the god "tolerance" and the shifting sands of relative truth impact us, as well. We do see signs that "Christendom" is dying off and that perhaps one day soon we'll be able to minister to people who at least know they are not Christian. Soon, perhaps, we'll also have the blessings that Mark Driscoll enjoys: we can stop trying to convince the casual church-goer that there is real power to be had in Christ's name and instead boldly proclaim His offer of life and salvation to those who sit in the darkness.

And I, for one, hope that day comes soon.

How come Saudi Arabia understands what we don't?

2009-05-07T11:27:00.002-04:00

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519193,00.html

Okay, so this story is about a Muslim beauty pageant and adherence to Islamic morals. Okay, so I'm not just a Christian, but a Christian pastor. Okay, so obviously I'm not suggesting that Islamic morals are the definition of beauty. So just let all that drop for a moment and think about this, okay? This isn't about one religion over another, it's about an underlying truth: beauty has far more to do with what's inside than what's on the outside.

This pageant in Saudi Arabia undertands that truth. Not only understands, but celebrates it! Now contrast that with American beauty pageants. Evening gowns. Swimsuit competitions. Perfect teeth, perfect hair, bodies that are judged on whether or not they have perfect proportions . . . and just a nod--just the slightest nod--to whether or not the woman in the swimsuit has a brain or not.

In America, we celebrate outward beauty . . . but doesn't that beauty fade after a while? I mean, sure we find more and more ways all the time to stave off the inevitable, to hang on to the image of youth and beauty. And sure, as a result, we've got far more aging Hollywood stars than we've ever had before--both men and women--that are just plain knockout attractive even into their 40's, 50's, and 60's. But outward beauty alone is really not worth celebrating. A beautiful woman can still be a shrew. A ruggedly handsome man can still be angry and abusive. Despite their outward beauty, their treatment of others belies an inner ugliness that no amount of plastic surgery could ever fix.

Let me tell you something: My wife is crazy gorgeous and (if you don't mind me saying, and frankly even if you do) hotter than ever. You want to know why? Because she's beautiful on the inside, and that inner radiance shines forth. I've never met a woman who's been as dedicated and loving to her family as my wife Stephanie. I've never met a woman who's always so ready to give of herself and build into the lives of her kids. To build into the life of her husband. She's so beautiful inwardly that yeah, like that silly pageant, you could stick her into a full-body burkha and even then her beauty would still be unmistakeable.

I wish more Americans understood the value of inner beauty. I wish more men would judge women by more than their cup size or about the junk she got in her trunk. I wish more Christian women cared less about how they looked in a bikini and more about the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.

So yeah, right now? I wish we could learn a little something from the Saudi Arabians. Something that God's been telling us all along, but we've been a bit too preoccupied with our outward appearance to actually listen.

Proverbs 31:30-31 30 Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. 31 Give her the reward she has earned, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

Hugh Hefner's regrets

2009-04-28T12:54:00.003-04:00

Foxnews recently did a story on Hugh Hefner and his feelings of regret over certain choices in his life. You can read the full report here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518219,00.html

While just the notion of "Hugh Hefner" and "regrets" is certainly enough to cause the typical American male into a veritable tailspin of soul-searching angst. After all, if Hugh (who is what many consider to be the very pinnacle of male achievement: the eternal frat party combined with a healthy dose of Never Never Land) . . . if Hugh has regrets over HIS choices . . . then what chance does Joe Average have in achieving the perfect life?

But pushing beyond that riddled philosophical question, the thing that most interested me was this quote. "[I'd] like to find out what [Jesus Christ] was all about." Separate the reality from mythology. Find out the roots of what has become a major religion of my time. I was raised in a good Methodist home and I had questions about organized religion, and I would love to have the answers."

Hugh Hefner has money. He has a steady parade of beautiful, naked women. He does not just have power, he has an empire. He does not just have a legacy, he has influenced the course of entire generations.

And still . . . that pesky question of "Just who is Jesus, anyway?" remains.

"Who do you say I am?" is what Jesus asked. The answer to that question is still as crucial today as it ever has been. And, apparently, not even living the American Male Dream diminishes the burning need to answer it.

Yearning for life

2009-04-09T17:02:00.002-04:00

As yet another Lenten season comes to a close, I find my mind is far too distracted. Despite knowing their magnificently huge importance, I feel unprepared for the three days that lie ahead.

And yet I know that tonight Christ will help me to focus my attention where it belongs: on His Body. For tonight He speaks to me once again from the Upper Room, saying, "This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . given and shed for you." Tonight He humbly prepares to serve me as only He can. And yet not just me, but "we"; Tonight He unites all believers around His body and blood, and Him we have unity. Unity in sin that confesses our own frailties and faults, yes. But also unity in forgiveness and redemption from the hand of Jesus Christ Himself. I will proclaim His death with my fellow believers, and I will be neither greater nor lesser than any of them, instead I will be their servant, and they mine. Because our attention will be on Christ's Body, and not on ourselves.

Tomorrow He will, once again, draw my attention to Himself. And as I stand in the shadow of His cross, I will be reminded of the awful reality that my sins caused the death of my faithful friend Jesus Christ. And yet He will remind me that this is the way it had to be, that He had to go to this extreme so that there would be no doubt as to His love for me. And I will not like that truth . . . but I will rejoice in it nevertheless, because my focus will be on Him and not on myself.

And then Sunday . . . glorious, glorious Sunday! He will again draw my attention to that wondrous and utterly inexplicable event: His resurrection! I will stand in wonder, dumbfounded not only that such a thing could actually happen, but also that through it I am given the same gift: the gift of a fresh, new eternal life with Jesus Christ. An eternal life where my focus will no longer be on my own self, my own needs, my own wants . . . a life that, in thankfulness and praise, is entirely focused upon Christ.

On Faithfulness and Fruitfulness: Part II

2009-03-31T16:18:00.001-04:00

On Faithfulness and Fruitfulness: Part II

A week or so ago I wrote upon the importance—perhaps even the necessity—of faithfully working at that which God has called you to despite the lack of fruit generated from it. At that time, I had intended to write a second post on the subject just a few days later. But in an interesting turn of irony, my efforts to do so proved unfruitful. So here it is about a week later, I’ve had a few more days to dwell on the subject, and I believe I’m ready to shed some Godly wisdom on this.

Before we get any further, I want to take a ½ step back and talk about fruit. I made a pretty big deal about working even when you don’t see fruit last time, but I realized something important: Fruit’s not always what—or where—you think it is.

Picture that you’re a farmer or a gardener: You begin with a hope, a dream—some might even call it a vision—to grow a certain kind of fruit. To make those hopes into reality, you develop a plan. You begin to work that plan; cultivating the soil, planting the seeds, giving the seeds nourishment and sunlight and just the right amount of water. You’re attentive to the needs of the plant as it begins to grow, but you’re careful not to smother it. In short, you’ve done everything a good leader—whoops! I mean farmer or gardener!—should do to ensure that you get some good fruit at harvest time.

So, you’ve done your preparatory work and you want to see fruit. What are the possibilities that could happen? What might spoil your perfectly laid plans for fruitfulness?

1) You could be looking for long-term fruit in a short-term timeframe.

When I was a teenager, my family lived on an orchard for a period of time. I learned a good deal more about fruit trees than I knew existed! And one of the things that I learned is that a brand-new fruit tree will not produce fruit for 3-4 years.

If you planted a peach tree, that news would be a BIG shock if you expected to have fruit in the fall, wouldn’t it? Similarly, in your ministry you could be looking for fruit that takes a long time to develop (like discipleship, changed attitudes about giving, hearts radically committed towards mission), but you’ve only allotted a short span of time in which you thought you’d see it. Think a little more deeply about what kind of fruit you want to see, and then ask yourself, “How long did that change take to produce fruit in my own life?” I think you’ll find that you’ve most likely underestimated the time it takes for a particular fruit to develop.

2) You could be looking for the wrong kind of fruit.

Most ministry leaders know very well that the old, old warning to not compare apples to oranges also stands true in ministry. But I know that I myself have been duped on a number of occasions into looking for oranges when what I truly planted in the first place was apples!

Let me explain: Specific ministry actions are intended to produce specific ministry results. No doubt that you, as a ministry leader, have specific results—or “fruits”—that you want to see from a given ministry. But have you done the work to ensure that what you want to harvest is actually the thing you’ve planted?

Take, for instance, the worship leader who sets out to rejuvenate and enrich the worship service. His grand vision, the one constant imperative that drives him constantly forward, is to make the service a place where God’s people can grow deeper, broader, and richer in worship. He comes up with a number of—let’s admit it—flat-out fantastic ideas to enrich the worship service. And then, to justify the changes he’s made, he commits to the church board to faithfully tracking worship attendance.

Now what’s that ministry leader just done? He’s decided that the best way to confirm to himself and others that he’s accomplishing what he wants to accomplish (deeper, broader, richer worship lives) is by looking for a different kind of fruit, namely counting rear ends in the chairs and pews. While worship attendance is a good thing to know, it won’t tell the worship leader (or church board!) anything meaningful about whether or not the goal of rejuvenating and enriching worship has been met! In short, he’s planted apples but counting oranges. The worship leader will continue to work hard at his new, exciting worship services, but until he learns to look for the kind of fruit he expects to harvest, he will be almost always disappointed.

3) You could be missing the fruit because you’re always looking at weeds.

One time, many years ago, my wife wanted a vegetable garden. The trouble was, she was pregnant and didn’t believe that she’d be able to keep up with the work such a garden would require. So I, being young, foolish, and a rather naïve romantic to boot, declared my undying love for my wife and to demonstrate, I would plant the garden and care for it myself.

Well, the garden was indeed planted, and if I recall correctly it was weeded . . . for a time. I lost interest, however, and very soon after that the weeds began to grow, and grow, and grow! When harvest time came I looked sadly at that garden—a thick, overgrown, patch of 3 foot tall weeds—wishing that I could undo the damage the weeds had done and mourning the loss of fruit.

But some sense of duty prompted me to dive into the weedpatch and see what I could find. And in the thick, dense, cover of weeds I began to find tomatoes. Small cherry tomatoes. Larger Roma tomatoes. Beefsteak tomatoes. So many tomatoes, in fact, that because of our garden’s abundance I was forced to give many away to my neighbor, who eventually even came and begged me to stop! The fruit was there all along! All there, all growing, all ready to harvest . . . but because I only had eyes for the weeds I could not see it, and therefore I could not rejoice in it.

Weeds are ugly. They are distracting. And they are even (regrettably) Christ-like; they are with you always even unto the end of the world! But although weeds can and do choke the life out of some fruit, they cannot kill it all. Learn to look past the weeds, find the fruit, and rejoice in it.

So, there you go. I hope that what God has been confirming to me brings some benefit to you, as well. But with all that God’s been teaching and showing me on fruitfulness and faithfulness, it appears that I’m going to have to write a third part of my two-part blog posts. Look for another post soon on knowing when fruitlessness means it’s time to move your ministry elsewhere.

The pastor's cat

2009-03-23T18:52:00.002-04:00

--Found this old story in my computer files, got a chuckle out of it, and figured I'd share.

A pastor had a kitten that climbed up a tree in his backyard and then was
afraid to come down. The pastor coaxed, offered warm milk, etc. The
kitty would not come down. The tree was not sturdy enough to climb, so
the pastor decided that if he tied a rope to his car and drove away so
that the tree bent down, he could then reach up and get the kitten.

That's what he did, all the while checking his progress in the car. He
then figured if he went just a little bit further, the tree would be
bent sufficiently for him to reach the kitten. But as he moved the car a
little further forward, the rope broke. The tree went "boing!" and the
kitten instantly sailed through the air-out of sight.

The pastor felt terrible. He walked all over the neighborhood asking
people if they'd seen a little kitten. No, nobody had seen a stray
kitten. So he prayed, "Lord, I just commit this kitten to your keeping,"
and went on about his business.

A few days later he was at the grocery store, and met one of his church
members. He happened to look into her shopping cart and was amazed to
see cat food.

This woman was a cat hater and everyone knew it, so he asked her, "Why
are you buying cat food when you hate cats so much?"

She replied, "You won't believe this," and then told him how her little
girl had been begging her for a cat, but she kept refusing. Then a few
days before, the child had begged again, so the Mom finally told her
little girl, "Well, if God gives you a cat, I'll let you keep it."

She told the pastor, "I watched my child go out in the yard, get on her
knees, and ask God for a cat. And really, Pastor, you won't believe
this, but I saw it with my own eyes. A kitten suddenly came flying out
of the blue sky, with its paws outspread, and landed right in front of
her."

On Faithfulness and Fruitfulness: Part I

2009-03-17T16:15:00.001-04:00

Every pastor I know has struggled with these twin issues. Every seminary professor I’ve talked with and interacted with has had trials with this. Every committed church member in whom I’ve seen God birth a passion and zeal for a new ministry I’ve also seen struggle with the same form of soul-searching, gut-wrenching angst.
It’s the issue of faithfulness and fruitfulness. In essence, it’s the struggle between being faithful to what God has called you to do and the nearly all-consuming desire to see fruit produced through it. And it can eat God’s people alive.
I want to devote this first of two “Faithfulness and Fruitfulness” posts to encouraging faithfulness even in the absence of fruitfulness. Why? Simply because faithfulness—in this case, especially faithfulness to God’s calling—is a prince among virtues. Enduring faithfulness embodies courage, steadfastness, unyielding commitment, and far-reaching vision. It acts in the moment, looks for tomorrow, and lives rooted in eternity. Faithfulness is a product of having clearly heard God’s voice and responding with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength. It is nothing less than life-transforming.
The Scriptural examples of faithfulness to God’s calling even in the absence of fruitfulness are numerous and span both the Old and New Testaments. But the one story that caught my attention earlier this morning was the story of Joshua and the fall of Jericho as it is told in Joshua 6:1ff. If you would, please take a few minutes right now and review that story before you continue reading. I promise I’ll be here when you get back . . .

. . . Now that you’re back, I want you to pretend something. I want you to pretend you’re just another Israelite army grunt. A member of the rank-and-file. And you’re on your 4th day of marching around Jericho. You know nothing of God’s promise to Joshua, you’re just following orders. And those orders are beginning to sound pretty . . . well, pretty dang stupid by this time, aren’t they? You have no victory in sight, just what has become the day-to-day grind of marching around in circles. So what are you going to do?
It’d be easy to cut and run. Give old Joshua the finger, pack up your bags, and leave muttering under your breath about the lack of leadership, the questionable battle tactics, and even whether or not God’s promise of a land for Israel was true. What’s more, it would be perfectly logical to do so. It’d be human nature. And you’d probably even convince a few to leave with you.
So why stay? I’m not even going to try and use the “because you’d miss out on the victory in the end!” argument. Remember . . . you’re only on Day 4. There is no victory. So why stay? Why keep at it? Why should anyone keep faithfully working when it’s not producing any fruit?
1) Keep at it because sometimes faithfulness is a matter of character, not convenience. It’s convenient to leave because things aren’t exactly as you dreamed. But character—good character—demands sticking to task even when it seems logical, or easier, or even better to just ditch it. In a culture that absolutely fawns over convenience, character boldly stands out against the status quo.
2) Keep at it because faithfulness is catching, and others are watching. People everywhere are looking for two things: a reason to quit, and a reason to keep going. They want to know if there’s an easier way out, but they also want to have inspiration to keep walking the path. And nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G, is as inspiring to watch as a person of unquestionable character sticks faithfully to task. You keep at it, and they’ll be inspired to follow.
3) Keep at it because faithfulness is its own reward. You want praise? You want accolades? You want huge crowds of followers hanging on your every word? Then—and hear this very well—you’re working for the wrong reasons. You’re after glory, not ministry. You want to impress, not to bless. Seek after those things, and you’ll sometimes get them . . . but you’ll be disappointed and disheartened when you don’t. But seek God first, endeavor to be faithful to Him and His calling, and you will always have the reward of knowing a job done faithfully and to the best of your ability.
4) Finally, keep at it because you can. If it was just your strength you had to work from, then when your strength failed so would you. But “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” The incomparable, immeasurable grace and mercy of God given to you personally through Jesus Christ carries with it a promise: God will never leave you nor forsake you. He is with you to the very end, through thick and thin, forgiving your shortcomings, loving you as you are, and empowering you to do that which is good in His sight.

You know . . . there’s one more thing yet to add, and that’s this: The “fruit” end of the deal? That’s not your business. Never has been, never will be. It’s natural to want to see fruit grow as a result of your faithful work at what you’ve been called to do. There’s nothing wrong with you if you desire to see people’s lives impacted, to see hearts and minds transformed, to see entire communities and regions and even nations shaped and molded and reborn through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You want to see people changed and grow in Christ. I commend you for that.
BUT . . . the thing about fruitfulness: it’s not your business. It’s God’s. You’re the sower that plants the seed. You’re the farmer that harvests the grain. But the One who causes the seed to grow, who makes the plant shoot forth and bear glorious, wonderful fruit? That’s God . . . and God alone.
Working for God involves what is, for many, a terrifying truth: He births an idea in your mind, a passion in your heart, calls you to work faithfully at that idea and passion . . . and then demands that you leave all the results up to Him. That takes an enormous amount of faith, for He may choose to never grow fruit in others from your work. It takes an enormous amount of trust to work faithfully and still believe that it’s not all in vain. But what I said above is still true: God is with you. In Christ He strengthens you to put your hands and heart into your work, and gives you the faith that can still entrust the results to Him. In Christ, you can be faithful even in the face of a lack of fruit.

2009-03-12T14:22:00.002-04:00

Check out my friend Dave's blog post on the recent news story regarding the imminent demise of Christianity in America:

http://itslikeherdingcats.blogspot.com/2009/03/revival.html

Dave says, "This is why, after all the calamities proclaimed in the articles I linked to yesterday, I am not afraid for the future of the Church. The future of the Church is not dependent or locked in a cause and effect relationship with the culture.The future of the Church is completely dependent on the power of God. And He is able. Exceedingly abundantly able. To do. To do more. To do more than we could ask.To do more than we could ask or imagine."

That deserves a BIG amen. Dave, thanks for the reminder that the Church shall remain according to God's promise and power!

Momentum and the speed at which it can be switched

2009-03-12T13:58:00.000-04:00

When I read the big-name church leadership or church transitioning books, one thing that seems to stick out in my mind is the concept of momentum. You know, the concept borrowed from Newtonian physics (there called inertia: “a body in motion tends to stay in motion”) that insists once an organizational structure gets moving down a path it is almost certain to stay on that path. The leadership books then pick up on that and counsel that if you put the church on the right path, it will not only stay on that path but also pick up steam and speed and begin to grow. Something like a snowball rolling down a mountain. They make it sound so easy.
I had a recurring dream as a kid. Well, more of a nightmare, actually, because (for some reason I’ve never understood) it was intense and frightening. That dream was always the same: A dark and shadowy background with me on a rocky ledge. I would push a huge, heavy, tar-like ball. Constantly rolling it slowly over and over and over. My hands would stick into it and threaten to trap me in it. My body would strain against the ball unceasingly but I would accomplish almost nothing. (As an aside: if you’ve seen the movie “The Incredibles” and recall the part where Mr. Incredible is captured by the guns shooting the black, viscous, expanding goo, then you can almost understand my dream. I very nearly freaked out when I saw that.) My dream was the opposite of momentum.
Every church has some form of momentum. But I am recognizing more and more that each church has its own natural speed of momentum, as well. That speed has very little to do with size, a fair bit to do with structure, and a lot to do with the church’s own culture. Simply put, some churches can switch momentum fairly quickly. My friend David likes to brag that his church can “turn on a dime and still give nine cents change”. There’s a church that can speedily switch their momentum and head in a new direction quite quickly! Other churches, like my own, are just as able to switch, but the process is slower, and so every step becomes more obvious to leadership and the congregation as a whole and yes, like my dream, that process can be frightening.
To any pastor, the practicalities of this should be obvious: Genuine change only comes at the maximum speed allowed by the individual church’s culture. Try to make broad, sweeping, fast changes in a slow-momentum church and the church will by its nature not respond to those changes. It will reject them. Not because the changes are bad or unnecessary—in fact, oftentimes the church recognizes the need for the change!—but simply because the culture of the church is not equipped to handle change at that speed. In contrast, implement a five-year plan of slow change in a fast-momentum church, and they will get bored and—you guessed it—reject the change.

One more word for the especially inquisitive and insightful: You’re now asking, “Yes, but can’t I change the culture of the church to switch momentum at a different, more healthy, rate?” The answer is, of course, yes. Even church culture can be shaped and influenced and, over time, the rate at which momentum is switched can be changed. The caveat, however, is that changing the church culture is a slow and deliberate process. I personally think that a good rule of thumb would be to take your church’s normal rate switching momentum and cut it at least in half, probably more.

Freedom of planning

2009-03-09T15:00:00.000-04:00

In my mind, one of the most compelling things about having a church plan is the freedom that comes from not having to make decisions. That may sound odd, because after all the process of planning is positively rife with decisions that must be made: decisions of policy, decisions of practice, decisions of implementation and process. Many, many decisions must be made, so why do I say that it’s the freedom from decisions that I enjoy so much?
Let me explain: each one of us lives with a filter that regulates the amount of sensory data that we absorb. Major things like a hand on a hot stove or the pained cry of your own child are routed through that filter with top priority. Minor things like the white noise of a fan or the constant barrage of billboards are filtered out and relegated to a much lower status. With the near-constant stream of information the modern American is faced with every single day, without a filter the mind would be overwhelmed within minutes of waking up in the morning.
Depending upon what’s important in your life, your filter is preset (by your nature, your personality, your upbringing, your religion, etc.) to be triggered by things that you consider important and file away mostly everything else. This is why I—as an admitted geek—might notice a news story on a new smartphone or other piece of gadgetry, but my wife might filter out the same story and instead notice one on the challenges of homeschooling. The filter prevents us from having to make thousands of constant “Is this important?” decisions throughout the day, because we have already made one large decision: to preset our filters for what matters to us.
This is what’s so great about a plan! A plan is like a filter, only for a church instead of an individual. In a plan, we do the hard, hard work of deciding ahead of time what will be important and, in a sense, pre-set the organization’s filters to pay attention to those particular things. Which, in turn, then gives the church a marvelous amount of freedom because it no longer has to occupy itself with endless “Is this important to us?” questions because it already has a plan. It already has focus. It already has clarity. It already has decided what’s important, and can focus on doing those things.
That’s the kind of freedom that I really like: the freedom to act on what’s important.

"The Win"

2008-06-03T16:15:00.002-04:00

As you probably know, the church council has been meeting in small groups and studying Andy Stanley's excellent book, "7 Practices of an Effective Ministry". One of those practices is something called "clarifying the win."

"Clarifying the win" means to sit down, think it out, and then communicate what a goal looks like when it's acheived. For a baseball team it's pretty obvious: at the end of a game you have more runs on the scoreboard than the other team. That's a "win." But for a church it can get a little complicated. There's so many things that look on the surface to be a win. More people in the pews. Higher weekly offerings. People growing in Christ. Babies getting baptized. And the list goes on and on.

In our “7 Practices” small groups, one question I heard asked again and again was, “What’s the win? What’s the win for Our Saviour?”

I had an answer that swum around in the back of my head, but it was hard for me to articulate. I knew it had something to do with fulfilling our mission statement of bringing our neighbors into Christ’s chosen family. After all, if that’s our mission, then fulfilling that MUST be a win, right? But then the question was asked, “What does that look like? How do we know when we’ve actually done it?”

I’ve got the answer. Well, honestly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer has given me the answer. Final chapter of Life Together, final page . . . final paragraph:

“The day of the Lord’s Supper is an occasion of joy for the Christian community. Reconciled in their hearts with God and the brethren, the congregation receives the gift of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and, recieinv that, it receives forgives, new life, and salvation. It is given new fellowship with God and men. The fellowship of the Lord’s Supper is the superlative fulfillment of Christian fellowship. As the members of the congregation are united in body and blood at the table of the Lord so will they be together in eternity. Here the community has reached its goal. Here joy in Christ and his community is complete. The life of Christians together under the Word has reached its perfection in the Sacrament.”

There’s the win. Forgiven and redeemed sinners gathering together as the community of Christ around His Sacrament. Neighbors no longer, but full members of the Body of Christ, each of us joined together by grace through His Supper.

On being a pastor and wanting to see fruit

2008-03-11T12:57:00.000-04:00

In all honesty, for quite some time I've believed that there was something wrong with me as a pastor. The reason is simple: I want to see the good fruit of the Holy Spirit's work come about in the congregation through the result of my ministry. Nothing wrong with that, but when I don't see it I wonder, "Why am I even bothering?" I get depressed and despondent and wonder if my work hasn't been in vain. Like I said, I thought there was something wrong with me. My tradition and background places such an emphasis on "success" being "proclaiming the pure Gospel". i.e., if a preacher just stays faithful to the Word then he's done his job and that's all he needs to keep going. Doesn't matter if the congregation grows in numbers. Doesn't matter if the congregation rejects the pure Word. The fruit the pastor should look for is the pure Gospel being proclaimed. Now this morning I'm reading through Thessalonians and the Lord has granted me a gift: The Apostle Paul had the same struggles. He wanted to SEE results. So much so, in fact, that he worried and obsessed over the state of the Thessalonian's faith. It kept him up at night, so to speak. Were the Thessalonians growing in their faith? Were they withstanding trials and persecution? For that matter . . . did they remember me and my ministry among them? It bothered him so much that he sent Timothy. And it wasn't until he got a good report back--that they did indeed think of him fondly, that their faith remained strong and growing--that he could say, "NOW we really live. Our efforts were NOT in vain." Good stuff, there. Reminds me that I'm just like all ministers: I started out on this path because I wanted to see lives changed by encountering Christ, and seeing actual fruit coming about through my ministry is a definite reward. It is a gift from God, something that allows me to get up the next day and minister once more in God's name. To get back in the pulpit again on Sunday and preach His Word. When that fruit is not there, it's natural--and perhaps even expected--that I'll despair. It's natural for me to either re-evaluate my approach or desire to move on to more fertile ground. I'm not weird or broken . . . I'm just a lot like Paul. Good news, indeed. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to shut down and try to fix my laptop power cord that the dog has just chewed in half. Can't live without my laptop!

Hello, old friend . . .

2007-12-20T13:32:00.001-05:00

Well now, isn't that interesting. Been over a year since I've blogged. What happened?

Did I run out of things to say? I hardly think so. My profession demands that I say things on a continuous basis. So what happened?

I suppose you (and I) deserve a fairly honest evaluation. I suppose that in some ways I could say that the well ran dry. There's no doubt that God has been faithful to me and I have always remained His precious child. Not only that, but I have remained faithful to my calling as pastor to His church as I preached, teached, and administered His Sacraments to His people.

Not only that, but I can also say that I've honestly been seeking His face, trying to discern His will and direction for the church He has given me to shepherd. And I've remained connected to Him through studying His Word.

Nevertheless, I've felt a number of times over the past year that I was spiritually disconnected from Him in some fashion. Theologically, of course, I realize that this isn't accurate to say, as He has faithfully kept me connected to Him through His Word and Sacraments. But while that is true, it doesn't prevent me from feeling disconnected.

I think over the great prophets of the past and realize afresh that they all had periods of dryness, times when they felt distant from God. Moses . . . Elijah . . . John the Baptist . . . heck, even Jesus Himself. And while I am loathe to place myself in the category of these greats (or, for that matter, alongside the incarnate God Himself! :)), it's still true that I have experienced something of what they experienced. I've had questions about my calling. I've had doubts about my abilities to properly lead His flock. I've had opposition. And yeah . . . I've despaired of God's apparent lack of presence in my life.

But see, this is the main thing: Doubts do not equal reality. Questions do not restructure what truly is. While these things seem to remake life into their own image, the reality is that they are powerless to overcome the truth: that God has called me, that God has gifted me, that God has placed me where I am today and that He has led me--often unseen--through my wilderness wanderings and established me in a land that was previously unknown to me.

Which of course is nothing more than a way to say that while I've been away, God has been working in my life. And what He has done is made me stronger. More confident. But at the same time, He's made me more humble, more dependent upon Him . . . which, I guess, is to say that He's conformed me more to the image of His Son.

I've emerged from the wilderness without often having been aware that I was on a journey. What I considered struggles God considered lessons. What I considered hardships God considered bodybuilding. What I considered dryness . . . God considered a purifying season in the wilderness.

I don't know what season in my life is coming next. Naturally, I'd love a season of prosperity and peace and strength, but of course it's not me that gets to determine where God may lead. But what He has done is caused me to be more aware that no matter what may come, He has His good purposes for it. I only pray that He may offer His strength to me so that--regardless of the circumstances I find myself in--I may be faithful in all my callings as pastor, husband, and father.

Beyond the likeness of human . . .

2006-09-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

Reading in Isaiah today, and this verse caught my eye:

Isaiah 52:14, "His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man, and his form marred beyond human likeness."

And it kind of stuck in my craw. Not the verse itself, but the way some preachers like to sensationalize the cross event. The way they play it up. You know what I mean, those guys who make out like Jesus had more physical pain inflicted on him than any man before or since.

Now I just don't think that's true. Certainly execution by cross was horrible and painful. After all, that's where the word excruciating (ex crucae, "from the cross") came from. But one man's pain from flagellation and then crucifixion would likely be as excruciating as the next. And yet you occasionally hear some guy who focuses on the pain and the disfigurement of Christ as though it were entirely unique in the experience of humankind.

It just makes me think, because it's not the extremity of Christ's pain that saves us, but the extremity of His sacrifice. It's not the sensationalism of His suffering, but the purpose of His passion. Whether He shed one drop of blood or buckets, it makes no difference. The difference is that He did it for me . . . despite every bit of obvious evidence that I am unworthy, He chose to suffer the indignity of those wounds for me.

Submission for the best single Law-Gospel Bible verse of them all . . .

2006-08-15T11:58:00.000-04:00

Just reading Hosea. I know, I know . . . "why Hosea, of all things? You mean you just really had to hear a story about a guy marrying a prostitute?"

Yeah, I know. Seems kind of odd. But I stumbled across a verse I knew but hadn't thought of in a long, long time.

Hosea 6:1 "Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds.

He has torn us to pieces . . .
Amazing that God has the power to strike terror into our hearts . . . and that at times He actually uses it. Forcing us to recognize our utter dependence upon Him. Demonstrating clearly that He is God and we are not. Shredding every last ounce of the false reality of self-reliance. God's vicious mercy.

But He will will us . . .
Despite the agonizing blows of life, despite the fact that God has struck us so hard our ears are ringing . . . we look to Him in faith. Realizing that He has orchestrated events in order to call us back to Him. We confess that He is God and that in Him alone we find true peace.

Is God a sadist? No, no, of course not. Is He an abusive husband, beating His wife into submission? Again, the answer is clearly "No." So how to explain Hosea's words that God has torn us to pieces, that He has injured us?

It is a severe mercy. A mercy that uses the only language we will at times understand: the language of pain. Pain rouses us from our self-satisfied slumber to full awakening. Alert with newly-sharpened senses still sizzling like alcohol poured onto a cut, we at last see God for the majestic, awesome God that alone is worthy of our worship. We turn at last from our selfish selves to Him . . .

. . . and He binds our wounds and in Him we find peace.

It's not often . . .

2006-08-13T02:22:00.000-04:00

It's not often I like to be up at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

But tonight I go to a few hours of blessed sleep, confident in God's love for me in Jesus Christ. I have had the privilege of meditating upon Him and His great works for the past few hours. I feel no stress about what the morning may bring. I feel no anxiety over my qualifications as His servant. I am satisfied in the quiet hours to hear His voice and rest in Him.

Lord,

I could sing of your love forever.

Duty . . . or doody?

2006-08-09T14:49:00.000-04:00

So my wife has to run into town to go to an OB/GYN appointment, and I agreed that I could come home and watch after the children while she and the older two kids went to the appointment and then ran some errands.

So I'm just getting settled in, set up my laptop and arranged my books that I'm using to prepare for my new sermon series. Just as I'm ready to begin work in earnest, the baby approaches me. He's got something in his hands, which isn't unusual as in a family our size there's always something on the floor for him to find.

As he gets nearer to me, however, I jump back, realizing I don't want what he's got to offer. Yes, that's right . . . he had been digging in the back of his diaper and was bringing me the rather soiled fruit of his efforts.

Quickly steered him to the bathroom, dumped him in the tub, rinsed him off, washed him off, and then had to scrub out the tub as well. New diaper, new clothes, and now I'm finally back to work.

And people say ministry doesn't have it's occupational hazards!

Leaders and leading

2006-07-22T16:02:00.000-04:00

I've had the opportunity in recent days to think over leadership. I've been pleased to find that certain things I thought were essential in theory have been proved to be critical in reality. But I've also realized that some of very things (one of which I'll discuss below) is not something that I've actively put into practice.

How do leaders lead? Well, by influence, of course. If you have no influence, you have no followers. If you have no followers, you are not leading. It's that simple, really.

But how do they lead beyond their immediate circle of influence? In other words, how does a leader expand his/her sphere of leadership beyond the handful of people that he can directly influence? By developing other leaders.

Leadership follows a cycle. It is born, it grows, and it recreates itself. Quite simply, if a leader fails to develop new leaders, if a leader fails to recreate leadership in others, then his leadership is doomed to a very short life-cycle.

It's easy enough to see this in the Scriptures. Take Jesus, for instance. For three years He ministered to the people in Galilee, Jerusalem, and surrounding areas. But while He was ministering, He was also developing a ragtag group of twelve bumblers into a group of leaders that would turn the world upside down one day.

Beyond the Scriptures, church history also tells us that the Disciples themselves also recreated the same leadership in others that Jesus had created in them. The Twelve, in turn, discipled others. They showed them--by teaching and by example--what it meant to be a church leader. The Twelve, like Jesus, also realized that they must invest in future leaders. Though it's something of an over-simplification, it is nevertheless true that the Twelve mentored the Ante-Nicene Fathers, the Ante-Nicene Fathers the Post-Nicene Fathers, the Post-Nicene Fathers in turn gave what they had to others who followed them. Christianity would certainly not have survived without leaders begetting leaders.

I believe it remains the same today. As I lead, I must also be careful, be deliberate about developing new leaders. And I realize that thus far I've had good intentions. I've developed leaders as the opportunity came to me, but I wasn't deliberate. That must change in me, as it must in any leader.

I am sick

2006-06-28T17:49:00.000-04:00

I am sick because of how much of my heart is yet ruled by past hurts.

I am sick because of how much of my mind still obsesses over what should have been.

I am sick because I cannot forgive, and refuse to forget.

Lord Jesus Christ, help me to remember again today how much I have been forgiven in you. Here are the shards of my splintered heart . . .

heal them.

Here is my divided mind . . .
restore it.

Here are my frustrated, forced, feeble, frantic hands . . .

Take them into your nail-scarred hands and bring me release.

Short-sighted or blind-sided?

2006-06-13T17:47:00.000-04:00

Acts 9:14-16 15 But the Lord said to Ananias, "Go! This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name."

It occurs to me that what God had in mind wasn’t an instant gratification nor a complete revelation of Paul’s future. He gave Paul no vision showing all that he must suffer for the sake of the Name. There was no dream. There was no Divine voice. The Scriptures offer no record that He indicated to Paul in any way the extent of his future suffering for the sake of Christ; He merely told Ananias that He would insure Paul knew how much he must suffer.

And what if He had told Paul? Would Paul have shrunk back from his mission of His message? Would he have the strength, at this infant state of His faith in Christ, to willing go where God would lead him?

Perhaps suffering serves a purpose. I personally believe that it does. But if it is to accomplish God’s divine purpose it cannot be suffering that knows every jot and tittle of the outcome. Paul had no such assurances, and neither do we. Is it necessary that we know why God has placed a burden upon us? Is it not enough to merely know that He shoulders the burden alongside us? To know that He is working to accomplish His good through us from what we perceive as an evil laid upon us?

One thing I ask

2006-02-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

“One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His temple.”

Yes, Lord. This is what I ask. Take me, mold me, use me, shape me for Your service. I ask for no smaller task than what You choose to set before me, I ask for no smaller burden than what You would place upon me, and I ask for no greater reward than to be with You.

A Deafening Silence

2005-12-12T10:04:00.000-05:00

It’s Monday, and I’m tidying up my office after the busy weekend. My eyes fall across an open Bible, and the words of the shepherd turned prophet Amos look back at me. “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.”
And for perhaps the first time, I ponder the tragedy of the heavens clanging shut with a deafening silence. My soul, for a brief moment, tastes the thirst of being parched for the Living Water, I experience the curious emptiness of having no Bread . . . and in that moment a snack becomes a feast, and I savor the fulfilling meat of His Word once again.

Arrows, warriors, and misspent youth

2005-12-08T14:57:00.000-05:00

“Discipline your son,” the master said, “and he will give you peace.”
“But how shall I discipline,” the student pondered, “when I have none myself?”

Strong words to weak shepherds

2005-11-16T12:45:00.000-05:00

A friend gave me one of those Bibles that's broken up into daily readings. The idea is that you can read through the Bible about 15 minutes a day and have the whole thing done in a year. (I presume you then repeat the cycle rather than simply saying, "Well, I've read that! Now to move on!" ;-) ) Nice idea. I'm looking forward to this helping me grow in my spiritual discipline.

Today's reading struck me. It was from Ezekiel--that wildest and wierdest of prophets--and the Lord was speaking to Ezekiel in chapter thirty-four regarding the shepherds of Israel. Not the regular shepherds, but the spiritual ones. In the Old Testament they were called priests, and today we might call them a pastor.

One of the most notable features, in my mind, of the OT priests is that they were to subsist entirely off of what the Israelites brought for offerings. The priests would get a portion of the sacrifice and be allowed to eat it, and the Lord would get His portion. In this fashion the Lord ensured that the people would always have their priests (no distractions of having to earn a living, so the priests could always be there to do their priestly duty) and that the priests would always be cared for. I kind of like that concept, and generally look to it as God's structural model for ministry among His people.

But the spiritual shepherds of Ezekiel's day abused that privilege--they were doing ministry just to get the metaphorical wool and the meat and the curds of the sheep. They were doing it for the perqs, not for the ministry.

It's a heart-check moment for me. People have always said things to me like, "Oh, I know you'd do ministry for nothing." . . . and I always wonder if I truly would. Now, I have plenty of good reasons for not doing ministry for free; just add up the kids around the table and you can see what I mean. Kids need food, they need clothes, they need a place to live, and it's my responsibility to give that to them. To do that, I do NEED money, and so it would be irresponsible to take no salary at all for my work at the church.

Yet I also need to keep the Lord's warning to Ezekiel in mind. Why? Well, frankly, because I'm a greedy old so-and-so. Just like anyone else, I want to get the most I can. But I'm not called to this church to serve myself, but others. So I have to be on the prowl, looking out for my greed to sneak back in and get me wanting more.

So in the end, should I do ministry for nothing? No--God has also given me financial responsibilities as a parent and husband, and I do need a salary for them. But should I do ministry as though I would do it for nothing? Should that, in effect, be my attitude? It seems the answer is yes!

I don't do ministry to get things, but to give Christ. But neither do I refuse what God has established as being rightfully mine simply because I'm in a spiritual occupation. But it is--as always--a matter of priorities. Who's on top? Who's first? God is, and I follow His leading. And along the way, I receive with thanksgiving the gifts He has chosen to give me.

Not blogged for a while . . .

2005-11-08T09:45:00.000-05:00

And that kind of bugs me. Have I run out of things to say? (Though some may--rightfully--ask, "Did he EVER have something to say?" :)) I don't believe that, it seems as though other priorities have crowded out this time.

Which is sad, because I often use blogging as a time for self-reflection. Putting words on paper (paper??) helps me to organize them, to reflect upon them. Blogging freezes my thoughts into a static state, allowing me to see them with new eyes.

Old life and old friends . . .

2005-10-08T23:41:00.000-04:00

Visits from old friends are quite nice.

Life today is good!

Time's Fool

2005-10-01T23:23:00.000-04:00

Found this on one of my favorite sites. Ship of Fools is a site where Christians pick on themselves in satire and sometimes even brutal comedy. The recurring column by Andrew Rumsey is, however, quite intriguing and profound. You'll need to translate a bit into good ol' American English, but it's well worth it.

Praying today that you'll get the Divine joke.

Time's fool

RIDING IN HEARSES, as I do quite often (it's that huge boot – you can get so much in) is a singular experience. The sense of suspended reality it affords is due in part to slow motion, wheezing along at a stately 15 miles per hour whilst the traffic tapeworms behind you. It's also to do with other people's response, many of whom stop to cross themselves as you pass – something that only rarely happens to me when on foot – and their always allowing for you, letting you through, moving at your pace. It's a little like being in The Truman Show.Just recently, my limousine had inexplicably broken from the pack somewhere around South London's Heart of Drabness, Thornton Heath, and arrived at the cemetery with several minutes spare for the driver and myself to get to know each other a little better.As we stood stiffly by the graveside, he leant over and, in the conspiratorial tone beloved of undertakers, remarked, "I don't know whether you've observed this, sir, but if you look closely around the cemetery, you'll notice that all the headstones face towards Croydon.""It's quite deliberate," he added, just to hit the nail home.I gawped around like a halibut, and realized to my astonishment that he was quite correct. Taking myself in hand, I recovered sufficiently to counter that, if my friend were to look even closer, he might detect the residents ever so slowly turning back the other way. Nevertheless, his remark had left a deep impression: the thought of so many prone souls gazing for all eternity, not on the heavenly Jerusalem, but on this high-rise, pedestrianised purgatory was both hilarious and horrific. In the midst of life, we are in Deptford, as the poet Martin Newell remarked – but in the midst of death I do not intend to be in Croydon.AND YET THIS MEMORABLE EPISODE reinforced for me the vital truth that mortality is the basis of all humour. That and funny jokes, of course. In his wonderful book Wishful Thinking, American novelist Frederick Buechner suggests that one of the most significant passages in the Bible is where God tells Abraham and his nonagenarian wife, Sarah, that they are about to have a child. They proceed to snort their sandals off (Abraham "falling on his face" with merriment, according to Genesis chapter 17), while God keeps up the fun by telling them they are to name the boy Isaac, which, in Hebrew, means laughter. Buechner's explanation is well worth quoting in full:"Why did the two old crocks laugh? They laughed because they knew only a fool would believe that woman with one foot in the grave was soon going to have her other foot in the maternity ward. They laughed because God expected them to believe it anyway. They laughed because God seemed to believe it. They laughed because they half-believed it themselves.""Faith", he concludes, "is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter". Comedy lies in the gaps between what we ought to be, what we are, and what we just might be one day. Comic timing relies on eternity being written into the heart of man, and man knowing the absurd shortfall: bathos – the lapse from sublime to ridiculous – is thus a part of the comedian's stock-in-trade. In the biblical story, though, God appears to fool around with this familiar routine in the person of Jesus, whose resurrection rewrites the joke about the bloke who's alive, but then dies. The timing seems to be all over the place, but, for those who get it (and Christianity is a gag that plenty don't), the divine punchline makes sense of everything that went before. Moreover, it allows them to fool around with their time and place, too, until Kingdom come – in Thornton Heath as it is in heaven.Those who really glimpse this eccentric vision are quite often depressive, or slightly unhinged – or both, as was supremely the case with William Blake, artist, poet and Test Cricket fan. A South Londoner himself, Blake's most balanced and clear-headed act seems to have been attempting to persuade his father at the age of ten that he had seen hosts of angels in a tree on Peckham Rye (to which his father no doubt responded, nonsense, boy, there are no trees on Peckham Rye).Blake's epic, Jerusalem, is a cracked and fantastic epiphany of England infused by paradise, of earthly and heavenly places overlapping and time redeemed. To see and feel as he saw and felt is dazzling and disturbing in equal measure, and sufficient to make the mooniest poet sober up and rush to do something mundane, like fill in their tax return.As for me, a slow car to Croydon is just the thing to bring me down to earth's pregnant pause and graveside grin, grasping at the promise of Isaac. Abraham and Sarah got the joke, and it was counted to them as faith.

And now the time returns again:Our souls exult, and London's towersReceive the Lamb of God to dwellIn England's green and pleasant bowers.

I’m a little more than useless . . .

2005-09-18T20:49:00.000-04:00

Today was perhaps the first day in a long, long while that I realized, with happy joy, that God can and does indeed use me. He does have a place, a plan, and a use for me after all.

Inwardly I’ve doubted that for some time now. Certainly I “knew” the truth—that God has a plan for each of us, that God has a mission and a ministry for each of us. But inwardly I couldn’t quite believe that it was true of me.

I know that I’m 1 part perfectionist, 1 part my own biggest critic, and 1 part chief of sinners. I hold myself to a higher standard than probably anyone else on the face of the earth does. So it gets frustrating when I my performance doesn’t match up to my own expectations. My heart—which already seems so full of pain and regret for what could have been—becomes as a stone weight inside my chest. I can feel its pressure pushing . . . pushing . . . pushing.

I’m not sure how long this path of cardiac alchemy—of changing a heart of stone into a heart of living flesh—may take. I do know at least part of that depends upon me, upon my willingness to be, as my tagline says, “Real” . . . to be willing to be hurt, to be willing to suffer, to be willing to suffer the pains of healing and growth. But in reality it depends upon what paths God chooses for me, the roads He causes me to walk down as He molds, shapes, and chisels away at the cold granite. Not only my heart but my hurt lay in the skilful hands of the One before Whom all my paths truly lie.

It is that same God who, despite my ignorance of His workings, been using me as His sacred tool all along. Hence my joy at discovering this truth anew.

"Could this blog BE more empty in substance?"

2005-09-10T22:00:00.000-04:00

Funny! That's the exact thing an "anonymous" comment said to me. I love those kind of things. . . . "I'm going to tell you exactly the way I feel and really let you have it, but I'm not going to tell you my name!" You just gotta love people like that; all talk and no guts, all show and no backbone.

Nah . . . maybe that's a bit harsh. I suppose it may be. After all, at the very least the classic "anonymous note" provides a bit of laughter over the fallen condition of mankind at the end of the day. At the very most, it could provide an opportunity for self-reflection.

So, thanks, "anonymous". Your comment provided me with a bit of a self-indulgent chuckle tonight, a little laugh at someone who often takes himself too seriously--myself! Me, the big preacher man, nothing more than a vacuous, egocentric blowhard! Could I be emptier in substance? Oh, YOU BET I COULD! :D:D:D

Reminds me that God and not me is the center of the universe, that I'm just God's tool, and that only my ego thinks it's the other way 'round.

"Anonymous" . . . you have a good night. The laugh's on me!

What if . . .

2005-09-08T22:56:00.000-04:00

The world was like The Matrix? You know, where these powerful creatures had deluded everyone into thinking the world was just a fine and dandy place, but secretly they controlled everything that went on? And there was only one person who could restore true reality and save all of mankind, but that he had to die in the process?

. . . oh, wait. Guess that's not a "what if?" question after all! :)

BTW--been playing "The Matrix" on the ol' GameCube. Got me to thinkin', it did.

An open letter to President Kieschnick

2005-08-31T13:24:00.000-04:00

President Kieschnick,

I read recently in Christian News that a class action lawsuit has been filed against you and Vice President Diekelman by certain clergy and churches “on behalf of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.” I find this action reprehensible and having a flagrant disregard for Scripture.

Though I am not yet ordained, I am serving as the sole minister over a small congregation in Michigan as a deferred vicar. As such I realize that it is deemed poor form to criticize ordained ministers who have many, many more years of experience in the ministry than I. That being said, however, I found that my heart was breaking as I read the article, the list of men whom I must assume to be Godly leaders of the church where God has placed them, and the text of the lawsuit.

What of our love for Scripture? Does not the Apostle Paul say in 1 Corinthians 6:1 “If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints? 2 Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! 4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church! 5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? 6 But instead, one brother goes to law against another-- and this in front of unbelievers! 7 The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?”

What of our love for one another? When our Lord Jesus Christ says in John 13:35, “35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” do we not take that to heart? I weep for the hatred, the bitterness, and the unrighteous anger that has polluted the hearts and clouded the judgment of those church leaders who have resorted to this extremely unfortunate course of action. I weep that we as a church body have for my entire lifetime been consumed by factions and lived in a disregard for the mission of God.

What of our witness to the unchurched population? If we cannot settle these differences amongst ourselves, how is it possible that we will ever be able to seek and save the lost? How will we ever be able to snatch one more soul from the jaws of Satan and an eternity in Hell?

I confess before God and man the sins of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the sins in which I share, and I implore Him to restore His church. Not for our sakes—not for the sake of our history or tradition or love for Synod—but for the sake of those condemned to an eternity in Hell: our next-door neighbors, our brothers and sisters, the waitress at the coffee shop downtown and the clerk at the supermarket. If we, who have the commission to carry the light of Jesus Christ into those darkened lives, as a church body forsake those who need our message of hope and life, then is the grace of God offered in vain? Rather, may Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 6:3-10 be true of us as a synod, as well: “3 We put no stumbling block in anyone's path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. 4 Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; 5 in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; 6 in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; 7 in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; 8 through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; 9 known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; 10 sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

President Kieschnick, I pray for your leadership during these turbulent times. I pray that you will be kept close to God as He daily creates in you a clean heart and renews a right spirit within you. I pray that you will win over your enemies through your consistent and humble witness to the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

Your humble servant and co-worker in the ever-ripening fields,

Vicar Troy Neujahr

www.revneujahr.blogspot.com

The bitter root . . .

2005-08-25T23:22:00.000-04:00

of jealousy and envy is a difficult elixir to swallow. Oddly enough I try to do it anyway.

What is the point behind this? Why would I feel a need to compare myself to others? Do I really need to tear them down in my mind so that their accomplishments can be mediated in my shortsightedness?

This bile, this excrement, this sin must be eliminated. Like a weed, it grows quickly and silently, choking the good vine that must now struggle to grow. Pull it out by the roots, cut it out from my heart, remove it from my eyes.

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the
joy
of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit,
to sustain me.

Then

I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you.

Save me from bloodguilt, O God,
the God who saves me,
and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.